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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



The Old-Fashio?ied Garde?! a?id Other Verses 

(out of print) 

The Brandyzvine 

Illustrated by Robert Shaw ^0-50 

Swarthmore Idylls 

Illustrated by Robert Shaw $0'5o 

In a Brandyzvine Harvest Field ^0*25 

Old Meeting-Houses 

Illustrated $1.00 

/;; Memory of Whittier 

Illustrated ^o-50 

The Farm Calendar 

Illustrated ^o-50 

In preparation: 

Collected Poems 

Any of the above sent postpaid on receipt of price 

THE BIDDLE PRESS 

1010 Cherry Street 

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BRAND YWINE DAYS 




;s5 

I 



BRANDYWINE DAYS 

Or, The Shepherd's Hour-Glass 



By JOHN RUSSELL HAYES 
1* 



Illustrations by ]. CARROLL HAYES 
Frontispiece by ROBERT SHAW 




Philadelphia: The Biddle Press 
London : Headley Brothers 

1910 



The author wishes to thank the editors 
of The Book- Lover y Book News Monthly^ 
Everybody's Magazine, Friends' hitelligencery 
Lippincott' s Magazine and The Pathfinder for 
kind permission to reprint certain of these pages 



Copyright 1910 
By John Russell Hayes 



DEC 6 iri t 



To 
JAMES MONAGHAN 



^^ Alike ive loved 
The muses'' haunts, and all our fancies mcved 
To measures of old song 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

PrologTje: In Meadows by the Brandywine 10 

JUNE 

Coming to the Farm 11 

Our Old Village 14 

The Brandywine 16 

Beside this Twilight Shore 21 

In the Old Attic 22 

The Birds and the Poets 25 

Garden Song at Twilight 29 

Starry Meadows 30 

Sir William Temple 32 

Theocritus 35 

The Brandywine at Slumberville 39 

Devonshire Idyls 41 

Morning Rain 43 

A World of Green 46 

Among the Golden Wheat 49 

An Old- World Poet 52 



JULY 

PAGE 

Nature's Healing 55 

Book-Hunting in London 57 

"Old Fishing and Wishing" 60 

Old Hills My Boyhood Knew 65 

The Children • 68 

Old-Time Eclogues 72 

Oxford's Idealist 74 

Bion and Moschus 78 

One of the Elizabethans 81 

Home Scenes 86 

The Charm of Flower-Names 88 

Midsummer 92 

Dream-Ships ^ 94 

An "Exquisite Sister" 96 

Virgil of the Eclogues 99 

Adown the Brandywine 103 

An Hour with Herrick 106 

Silvia 114 

The Same Old Ways 119 

The Brook 122 

New Poets 124 



AUGUST 

PAGE 

Even-Song 133 

A Cuyp Landscape 136 

In Sir William Temple's Garden 140 

"Sweet Themmes! Runne Softly" 143 

In Quiet Waters 144 

After Harvest 147 

Humphry Marshall 150 

"Colin Cloute" 152 

A Dead Poet 156 

Cities of the Heart 159 

My Lady Slumbers 162 

Country Peace 165 

Up Stream 167 

Up the Delaware 169 

Below the Bridge 174 

The Dream-River 176 

The Upper Brandywine 178 

Threshing the Wheat o 180 



SEPTEMBER 

PAGE 

Autumnal Hours 183 

Googe's Eclogues Once More 187 

Spirit of September 189 

A Disciple of Keats 192 

Walter Pater Again 196 

The Indian's Grave 201 

More of Vaughan's Verses 204 

At Cedarcroft , 206 

Old and New Pastoral Poets 208 

With Lloyd Miffin's Sonnets 212 

The Old- Fashioned Garden 213 

The Gifts of God 217 

Autumn Silence 219 

A Celtic Poet 220 

Cecily 225 

The Sage of Marshallton Again 226 

Farewell to the Farm 228 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Opposite Page 
'Meadows by the Bra?idywine^^ {^fro?itispiece\ \J 

* Pastoral repose a?id pensivetiess^^ -TJa/' 

' The tiny town in old-world Oxfordshire^ ' ^S ^ 

'The garden in a golden dream^^ 27 \/ 

'Peaceful stream-side fields'''' ^O v 

'Among the peaceful farms it flows'*'' jp y 

'By silver Brandywine^ s Arcadian stream'''* j-j- y 

'Long-loved oaken solitudes'''' 66 J 

'Scores of sweet old-fashioned blooms^'' go 

'A land of peaceful quietude'''' loj 

The Home of Robert Herrick jo6 ^ 

"Tis here I love to tvalk at twilight hour"*"* 122 '' 

'Below the ancient grassy hill it flows'''' i^g "' 

* The old mansion invites the passer-by to pause and reflect ' ' 750 ,. 

' The woodland cool and stilT ' 1^8 \ 

'The brook sings on with ceaseless music ^^ l6ji 

'Small willows bend above'''' l6y '' 

* Where curves the Brandywine below the bridge^ ' . . . 174 ' 

'This green untroubled meadow-side'''' ^79 

'Peace and old-time charm'''' 1 86 

'Thy deep charm ^ O how I shall remember'''' .... i^li 

'Leafy summer solitudes'''' 202' 

'The old farmstead wrapt in autunni' s dream'^ .... 228' 



O MEMORY, call back the hours 
Of childhood's day among the flowers 
That grew in gardens sweet and old 
Beneath those skies of misty gold 
That 7nade the summers seem divine 
In meadows by the Brandy wine! 

Call back the breezes warm and sweet 
That drowsed across the yellow wheat 
And made the sylvan valleys ring 
With music light as dryads sing. 
With music faint and faery-fine. 
In meadows by the Brandywinel 

Dear Me?nory, call back again 
The soft and silver wraiths of rain 
That bent the buttercups, and sivayed 
The sleepy clover-heads, and made 
The hosts of dancing daisies shine 
In meadows by the Brandywinel 

Call back the glow-wor?n's elfin fire 
That wavered where the marshy choir 
Made reedy music ghostly-light 
Across the fragrance of the night. 
Till lucent stars began to shine 
O'er meadows by the B?'andyiuineJ 

far, sweet hours, what strange regret 
Brings tears for you to-night, while yet 

1 would not have your magic be 
More than a dream — a dream — to me, 
A dream of vanished hours divine 

In meadoivs by the Brandywinel 



COMING TO THE FARM 



''I never list presume to Parnasse hill. 
But, pyping low in shade of lowly grove, 
I play to please myself e, all be it ill.'' 

— The Shepheards Calender 

"^ — I'UNE XV. Spenser's lines must stand at the head 
^ £* of my little Book of Hours, my Shepherd's Hour- 
Glass, for Spenser is held In honor of all the clan 
of shepherds — Spenser 

"Who taught mee homely, as I can, to make." 

And here beside my ancestral stream the Brandywine, or 
old Indian Wawassan, as I rid me of the dust of clamor- 
ous streets, on this sweet mid-day of June, and take up 
once again my shepherd's crook and rural quill, I thank 
the dear God that He still keeps green for town-wearied 
folk such lovely nooks as this. How true are those words 
of Keats, — 

"To one who has been long in city pent, 
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair 
And open face of heaven, — to breathe a prayer 
Full in the smile of the blue firmament." 

O meadows of buttercups and daisies, ye green old 
willows and hillsides of fragrant wheat and clover, and 
thou beloved soft-flowing Brandywine — once more we 
come to pass the summer-tide amid your enchantments. 
Here in the new-old joys — the companionship of "mine 
own people," the babble and laughter of sweet children, 

[11] 



Brandywine Days 



music and happy song and the coming of gracious friends, 
quiet reverie and hours with the poets, beside our sylvan 
stream, in cool orchards and bird-haunted groves — the 
weeks will flow by like a dream of felicity. 

It is the hour of noon ; we have unpacked our impedi- 
menta and have ranged on the high little shelf over the fire- 
place Spenser and Herrick, Wordsworth and Keats, and 
Pater, and Fitzgerald's "Omar," the stout little "Com- 
pleat Angler" and the other delightful volumes. We have 
gone to the mossy spring-house down beyond the orchard 
and quaffed a drink divine from the limpid pool near the 
cream jars and the white custards that are cooling for 
our first country dinner. The bells are ringing by the 
old farm houses in the valley, and the farm folk are com- 
ing merrily down the hills to take their nooning. 

Sitting here at the ample secretary-desk, where my 
forefathers for generations have written up their farm- 
ing accounts, and entered in their journals the record of 
pilgrimings to distant meetings and of the coming of their 
fellow-Quakers on perennial visits — sitting here with 
fresh-pointed quill (in reality only a poor steel pen!), and 
musing on the cool, calm, old-fashioned charm of this an- 
cient House and idyllic landscape, I indite in the broad 
pages of my diary the opening impressions of this sum- 
mer's sojourn. Diary, did I say! forgive the word, 
shades of my fathers in this old Home. Hour-Glass let 
me rather name it, for old-time's sake and because a poet- 
loving Celtic friend of mine suggests the title; and "Shep- 
herd's Hour-Glass" for old Spenser's sake. "Ye Shep- 
heards Houre-Glasse" Spenser would have spelt it, in that 
delightful century of his when each man spelt as pleased 

[12] 




CO 

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a. 



Coming to the Farm 



him best, and before or-thog-ra-phers and such trouble- 
some folk were born. 

Here, then, the lowliest of shepherds records our com- 
ing to this antique Home by the Brandywine. 

So here to this old Farmstead have we come, 

A quaint red-gabled solitary House 

Breathing of peace and silence musical. 

Beauty and quietude and dreamfulness, — 

An old ancestral Home among its fields. 

Its garden flowers and swaying orchard boughs, 

Here in the heart of this still countryside 

Where broods the atmosphere of elder days. 

Fragrant of memories and sentiment 

And happy friendship. Here sleeps soft repose, 

A pastoral repose and pensiveness, 

Virgilian in its dreamy, tranquil charm. 

— O how my heart goes out in happy thought 

To this old Home and all its memories, 

Its golden past, its hallowed links that bind us 

To those dear souls gone with the long-dead years! 



[13] 



OUR OLD VILLAGE 



JUNE XVI 

aN ancient mansion falling to decay, 
A blacksmith's shop and seven cottages 
Among their gardens, and one white farm house, 
Make up this hamlet by the Brandywine, — 
A sleepy village wrapt In drowsy peace 
And lazy silence, save when at the forge 
A horse Is shod, making the anvil ring 
With rhythmic music ; or when farmers meet 
Beside the watering-trough and talk of crops, 
The roads, the weather and the price of wheat. 
Above the village silently and slow 
The Brand5rwine moves under sylvan shades. 
But at the smithy sweeps forth In the sun 
And murmurs down a pebbly slope, and v/Inds 
With merry song below a garden wall. 

Like to the village Goldsmith dearly loved 
It seems to me, this hamlet quaint and small, 
Where Time stands still, and ancient usages 
Give it an air of peace and old-time charm. 
— And I remember happy half-hours here 
Beside the blacksmith's door, watching his fire 
Send up its sparks, or listening to the droll 
Converse of rustic humorists or the tales 
Of mighty fishing In the Brandywine. 

[14] 





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Our Old Village 



O kindly, unambitious, homely hearts, 

'Tis good to come among you once again 

And hear your friendly greetings. Little change 

The years have wrought in your secluded homes; 

And while the busy world has hurried on 

With restless energy, you are content 

With quiet tasks and quiet country ways. 

The silver Brandywine with lulling song 

Soothes all the sunny air, and drowsily 

The locusts hum among your garden trees. 

While from the farms that hem your hamlet in 

The ripening corn sends down its fragrant breath ; 

And tranquilly as in the tiny town 

Of old thatched roofs and gabled cottages 

Whence came my sires in old-world Oxfordshire, 

Life slumbers on In your untroubled shades. 

— Peace and contentment evermore abide 

In your quaint hamlet by the Brandywine! 



[15] 



THE BRANDYWINE 



"Clear and gentle stream! 
Known and loved so long. 
That hast heard the song 
And the idle dream 
Of my boyish day." 

^— I'UNE XVII. Our beautiful Brandywlne "with Its 
^^w tributaries and enshrining hills, the very heart 
and centre of old Chester County," Is most 
widely known for Its association with that fateful day In 
1777, when Washington led his colonials across the hills 
of Birmingham, and when Lafayette — last flower of the 
old French chivalry — was wounded In battle. Near Its 
banks lived and wrote Bayard Taylor, who deeply loved 
the "peace and blissful pastoral seclusion" of these Ches- 
ter County meadows; and here on a summer's day Sidney 
Lanier, meditating his lyric "Clover," exclaimed, 

"Dear uplands, Chester's favorable fields! . 
I He as lies yon placid Brandywine, 
Holding the hills and heavens in my heart 
For contemplation." 

A third son of the muses, T. Buchanan Read, drew 
inspiration from his native stream; and there is no Ches- 
ter-countian, of any sentiment at all, who does not cherish 
a pride In the Revolutionary memories of the Brandywine, 
and a yet deeper afiFectlon for the stream for Its own fair 
sake as being his "home river." 

[16] 



T'he Brandywine 



''The rivers of home are dear in particular to all men," 
wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. As one may love the vi^ind- 
ing Schuylkill, another the Wissahickon's woodland pools, 
or a third the soft and faery beauty of the Susquehanna — 
so is the Brand3rwine endeared to those who have spent 
endless summer days along its green banks and floated 
on its placid reaches; and particularly so when the bond 
is the stronger by force of ancestral association with some 
old farmstead and willow-bordered meadow beside the 
beautiful stream. 

"Susqueco," one of the musical names given it by the 
Indians, seems to ally it in a measure to the Susquehanna; 
and the resemblance goes beyond that of the names, for 
in its lesser way our Chester County stream has the same 
alternate charm of tranquil deeps and of sparkling rapids 
that distinguishes that loveliest of Pennsylvania rivers. 
Nay, our Brandywine has a special character of its own, 
and that is its pastoral or idyllic aspect. Few are the 
minor streams that so completely satisfy one's sense of 
peaceful and untroubled rural tranquillity, or beside whose 
calm waters he would rather pitch his tent or read his 
favorite poets. The grey old homesteads and venerable 
barns of the Brandywine valley seem an inseparable part 
of the landscape, around which cluster the dear associa- 
tions and memories of generations. The corn has sprung 
upon these hillsides and given of its golden wealth through 
countless Octobers ; it seems almost as if there could never 
have been a time when the wheat did not lie in abund- 
ant sheaves on these uplands in the silent midsummer 
nights, or the apples grow mellow and fall to earth in the 
long, drowsy days of September. It is a region of placid 

[17] 



Brandywine Days 



and serene security, such a happy countryside as Virgil, 
immortal laureate of husbandry, would have described 
with affectionate art — such an opulent land as we read of 
in the ancient Odyssey, where *'pear upon pear waxes old, 
and apple upon apple — yea, and cluster ripens upon clus- 
ter of the grape." 

The very fishermen that haunt its shores seem to par- 
take of the stream's lazy placidity; it was long ago de- 
spoiled of its finer fish, but still may these patient anglers 
be seen, seated in their favorite nooks under some droop- 
ing willow or white-armed buttonwood, where the turf Is 
softest, waiting through the quiet hours for the nibbles 
that so seldom disturb their motionless corks. Yet one 
cannot call these hours idly spent, for the true angler is 
of honest Izaak's ilk, and his hours of serene contempla- 
tion beget in him a vein of mild philosophy, rendering 
him sweet of temper and most companionable. The lit- 
erary fisherman is perhaps not seen here so often, yet there 
are those who love equally well to read and to fish. 

"Sometimes an angler comes and drops his hook 
Within its hidden depths, and 'gainst a tree 
Leaning his rod, reads in some pleasant book, 
Forgetting soon his pride of fishery; 
And dreams or falls asleep, 
While curious fishes peep 
About his nibbled bait." 

Flowing down through the heart of Old Chester 
County, the Brandywine enriches many a secluded dale 
and meadow where the quiet cattle graze beside the odor- 
ous mint and the nodding buttercups. Curve by curve 
it winds among the folded hills, silencing and receiving 

[18] 



The Brandywine 



Into its tranquil bosom "the filtered tribute of the rough 
woodland" from the thousand little brooks that purl and 
babble down the slopes of wild grass and crimson clover. 
Beneath the arching boughs it drifts, home of the squirrel 
and fox, and of the wood-robin that pours out his solitary 
song in cool sylvan retreats. Wild grapes hang over the 
water, the stately cloud-fleets sail slowly above and melt 
away beyond the hill, and the locust shrills in the loneliness 
of the hot noontide hour. 

As the twilight hour draws on it is pleasant to push 
one's boat far from shore and watch the closing of the day 
on the farms. Down from the hillside come the shout of 
the farmer's boy and the lowing of far cattle; and the 
idler in his boat knows that in the old stone barns the 
horses are crunching their oats and hay, that the swal- 
lows are nested beneath the eaves, and the pigeons have 
ceased their day-long crooning. Then, as he rows slowly 
In the sunset glow, while the boat's eddies lap the lily- 
pads and set all the reeds to nodding, he will perhaps 
pass in his musing fancy from these scenes to the green 
downs of England, where at this hour the 

"tender ewes, brought 1101116 with evening sun, 
Wend to their folds, 
And to their holds 
The shepherds trudge when light of day is done." 

After all, the associations that cluster about a stream 
make it beautiful to us beyond other waters ; if one's dear- 
est memories are allied with the Delaware, the Susquehan- 
na, or the Wissahlckon, that particular home-stream Is to 
him fairer than all others. To Chester County folk our 

[19] 



Brandywine Days 



sweet pastoral Brandywine must ever have an especial 
appeal; there the grass is softest, the plashing of^the water 
most melodious, and there the twilight grieving of the 
ring-dove most touches the heart. For us these remem- 
bered hills are clothed with beauty, and these misty woods 
with enchantment. Something of ancestral feeling awakes 
as the thought of peaceful townships with their names 
that carry us back to the old hills and valleys of England 
and Wales; 

"Tredyffrin, Cain and Nantmeal hold 
Traditions of those sires of old; 
While Uwchlan in her inmost vale 
May hear at eve some Cambrian tale." 

Truly, we bless the tranquil serenity of the grey 
homesteads about which the memories of our fathers are 

I 



yet green! 



"Old homes ! old hearts ! Upon my soul forever 
Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter; 
Like love they touch me, through the years that sever, 
With simple faith; like friendship, draw me after 
The dreamy patience that is theirs forever." 



[20] 



BESIDE THIS TWILIGHT SHORE 

JUNE XVIII 

XWILL not ask for more, — 
Only one love-song sorrowful and golden 
Beside this twilight shore, 
Sweet as Ulysses heard in legends olden, — 
I will not ask for more ; 

Beside this twilight shore 

One love-song with its pathos sweet and olden, — 
I will not ask for more, — 

Yearning with sorrows and with memories golden 
Beside this twilight shore. 



[21] 



IN THE OLD ATTIC 



I'UNE XIX. We awake this morning to country 
ffl- sunshine and joyance; the blackbirds chatter in 
the tall maples, and from its home in the wood- 
land edge the ring-dove is softly pleading. The long- 
silent old House is sad only in memory now, for its halls 
are vocal with the song of children, merry, merry children, 

"Crazy with laughter and babble and earth's new wine." 

The tender melancholy of the ring-dove's note seems 
veritably a token of the sentiment of the old House in 
these bright June hours, a ''pensive recollection" mingling 
with its present blithe music. Through all the months 
between our summers here, the ancient Homestead dreams 
in solitude. The tall colonial clock ticks not, but stands 
mournful in its shadowy corner; the midnight mouse plays 
on the moonlit garret floor; and the quaint harpsichord 
stands silent and immelodious, a memorial of some an- 
cestral "gentlewoman of the old school" who held not so 
strictly to the Quaker rule that she must shut music out 
of her sweet life. 

"I know she played and sang, for yet 
We keep the tumble-down spinet 
To which she quavered ballads set 
By Arne or Jackson." 

In those long still months of autumn and winter the 
shuttered windows reflect no sunset skies, and the moan- 
ing winds pile with their store of faded leaves the deep 
doorways and the flag-paven porches. The great pine and 

[22] 



In the Old Attic 



the maples sway about the red chimneys, strewing the 
ground with ruined nests; November rains drip, drip 
sadly upon the mossy shingles; and the snows whiten roof 
and lawn and deserted Garden with their noiseless drift, 
across which the shy tree-dwellers leave their tiny foot- 
prints unseen save of the lonely old House. Naught but 
the venerable Mansion is witness of those shifting sea- 
sons or listener to the wild harmonies of the December 
storms. 

But now the dream-year has ebbed away, and awaken- 
ing June fills the once-quiet halls with its flood of soft 
light, its 

"Sunshine beating in upon the floor 
Like golden rain," — 

and its enchantments of echoed bird-song and joyous child- 
life. 

Already the little folk — Brown-eyes and Ray and pen- 
sive Bunny and romping Will — have clambered to the 
old attic, that dreamland of childish hearts. Among its 
lumber of venerable furniture and hair trunks and anti- 
quated finery they are making merry. How the garret 
ghosts must ache to be thus rudely encroached upon, and 
the mice scamper to their inmost holes below the rafters! 
The dear little folk are looking up with wonder at the 
strings of lavender and herbs that fill the dim attic with 
faint aromas; and now I hear the quaint lacquered spinet 
quavering in high and sorry tones under the touch of cu- 
rious small fingers. Those melancholy and mournful 
echoes of airs long forgotten, and the soft fragrance of the 
dried lavender, rouse thoughts fainter even than memories 

[23] 



Brandywine Days 



or dreams — of the far-off days when the antique harpsi- 
chord stood In its pride in the ample drawing-room, and 
the youths and maidens of the hamlet, prim and sedate in 
their flowered silks and other dainty apparel, passed from 
singing part-songs around the little instrument to stroll 
among the lavender beds and the "laylock" and hollyhock 
corridors of the glowing Garden. 

Ah, bonny children, you have started a pleasant vein 
of reverie for me this day, with your romping up beneath 
the eaves. It is in such hours, amid musings like these, 
and looking out upon so fair a landscape, that one has some 
glimpse of the abiding truth of things. It was William 
W. Story, I think, who wrote. 



"Ah Heaven ! we know so much who nothing know ! 
Only to children and in poets' ears, 
At whom the wise world wondering smiles and sneers, 
Secrets of God are whispered here below. 
Only to them, and those whose gentle heart 
Is opened wide to list for Beauty's call, 
Will Nature lean to whisper the least part 
Of that great mystery which circles all." 



[24] 



THE BIRDS AND THE POETS 

^'In this sequester d nook how sweet 
To sit upon my orchard-seat! 
And flowers and birds once more to greet , 
My last years friends together." 

^ — J'UNE XX. This blithe morning the finches and 
ii- red-breasts are chirruping, the yellow orioles flash 
in and out among the green orchard boughs, and 
from the far wood edge come the pensive notes of the 
ring-dove. Ah, that plaintive call of the ring-dove! — no 
sound in this Brandywine valley rings so vividly in the ear 
of memory as that solemn sweet call across the fields 
through all the long drowsy dreamy summer days and on 
into the enchanted twilight. 

Ah, gentle mourner, what soft pain is thine, 
What tender melancholy stirs thy breast? 
Perchance some old romantic sorrow lies 
, About thy heart, or memory of wrong 

Done to thy kind long since in some green vale 
Of dim Thessalian woods. Thy pensive note 
No elegy can match, and thy sweet woe 
Makes memorable the sacred twilight hour. 
So ran my thought, in my love for this sorrowing and 
mystic singer; but, as Alice Brown has asked, who may 

"translate the desolation of the dove? 
For even in the common speech 
Of feathered fellows, each to each, 
Abideth still the primal mystery, 
The brooding past, the germ of life to be." 

[25] 



Brandywine Days 



Countless are the tiny carollers among the leaves in 
these primal days of summer. Now, and through the 
months to come, their gushing music will echo around us, 
an inseparable and supernal accompaniment to all God's 
wild beauty. 

How the songs of birds have filled the ears of the 
dreamers in every age ! Our English poesy is forever mel- 
odious with the choirs of the air. I open a favorite an- 
thology, and the first poem, written a century before 
Chaucer, begins thus jubilantly, 

"Sumer is icumen in, 
Lhude sing cuccu !" 

And the latest magazine has, from the pen of John 
Burroughs — who is cheering his latter days with one bird- 
poem after another — a lyric on the bush sparrow; the tiny 
caitiff purloins my grapes, sighs the old bird-lover, but 

"Still I bid him welcome, 
The pilf'ring little dear; 
He pays me off ih music, 
And pays me every year." 

So we hear the birds warbling through all the pages 
of English verse from first to last. Milton gives us his 
favorite nightingale. Sorrow's own singer, 

"Most musical, most melancholy;" — 

and the same wondrous bird has been enshrined forever by 
Keats in the deep Celtic pathos of that ode written be- 
neath the trees, of a May morning, while the young poet 

[26] 




I 



The Birds and the Poets 



yet thrilled with the recollection of Philomela's midnight 
music. 

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird ! 
No hungry generations tread thee down ; 
The voice I hear this passing night was heard 

In ancient days by emperor and clown : 
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home. 
She stood in tears amid the alien corn ; 
The same that oft-times hath 
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 

The skylark, beloved alike of Shakespeare and Shelley, 
chants his dewy matins at the golden gate of heaven — 
unforgetably — for if the skylark should unhappily disap- 
pear from earth, he would still live for all time in Cymbe- 
line and the Sonnets, in many a line of Wordsworth, and 
In the throbbing stanzas of that almost last, surely most 
perfect, of Shelley's lyrics: 

"All that ever was 
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass." 

If our American songsters have not received their 
meed of praise from classic poets, they have had very beau- 
tiful celebration from some of our latter-day bards. The 
vireo, the mocking-bird, the meadow lark, the yellow-breast 
and the thrush, deserve the noblest words of Sidney Lanier, 
Celia Thaxter, Henry van Dyke, J. Russell Taylor and 
the others. The last-named poet portrays very Intimately 
the Inner melody of some of our homeland songsters. I 
know of no finer American laureate of the birds. Witness 
this lyric, — 

[27] 



Brandywine Days 



'Blow softly, thrush, upon the hush 

That makes the least leaf loud, 

Blow, wild of heart, remote, apart 

From all the vocal crowd, 

Apart, remote, a spirit note 

That dances meltingly afloat, 

Blow faintly, thrush ! . . . 

O lightly blow the ancient woe. 

Flute of the wood, blow clearly! 

Blow, she is here, and the world all dear. 

Melting flute of the hush. 

Old sorrow estranged, enriched, sea-changed, 

Breathe it, veery-thrush !" 



[28] 



GARDEN SONG AT TWILIGHT 



JUNE XXI 



© 



HE sunset's golden flush, as daylight closes, 
Wraps all the garden in a golden dream, 

The while you sit, dear heart, among the roses, 
And watch the sleepy stream. 



The marigold droops low, the poppy dozes, 
The lotus slumbers in a golden dream, 

And your own queenly head among the roses 
Bends toward the sleepy stream. 

Now let my lute with music's heavenly closes 
Mingle its magic with your golden dream. 

Until the moon's soft fire above the roses 
Silvers the sleepy stream. 

Dream on, dear love, while every flower-heart dozes, 
Let all your soul dissolve in golden dream ; 

And I will guard my saint among the roses 
Beside the sleepy stream. 



[29] 



STARRY MEADOWS 



"The phantom flood of dreams has ebbed 

and vanished with the dark, 
And like a dove the heart forsakes 

the prison of the ark; 
Now forth she fares through friendly woods 

and diamond-fields of dew. 
While every voice cries out 'Rejoice!' 

as if the world were new." 

'^ J'UNE XXII. Faery cloudlets hover and float above 
\^^ us this fresh green June day, the wood pigeon 
renews her sorrowing plaint, cat-birds chatter 
among the wild raspberry bushes, and in the gurgling of 
the song-sparrow I hear voices of the long ago — the 
song-sparrow, the blithe little friend to whom Celia 
Thaxter wrote affectionate greeting, 

"My little helper, ah, my comrade sweet, 
My old companion in that far-off time 
When on life's threshold childhood's winged feet 

Danced in the sunrise ! Joy was at its prime 
When all my heart responded to thy song 
Unconscious of earth's discords harsh and strong." 

The poppies float on the billowing acres of wheat like 
crimson foam on that yellow tide, the grass stands lush and 
deep on the long slopes of the hillsides, and the meadows 
are starred with gem-like bells and florets of brilliant hues. 
Delicate white and pink and golden, these flowers are like 
those which Botticelli strewed with winsome art over the 

[30] 



Starry Meadows 



fragrant turf in his strangely fascinating "Spring" — or 
like those in the foregrounds that Fra Angel.ico rejoiced 
to paint into the little panels that enrich the walls of the 
mediaeval cells in San Marco. 

These blooms of ours fade away with the fading sum- 
mer. Not so those pictured flowers; they bloom with an 
immortality of ineffable beauty on the monastery walls. 
And what happiness, one must think, for the holy breth- 
ren amid their fasts and absolutions, their observance of 
matins and complines, to return from the spirit-world of 
adoration to those radiant pictures of sweet Tuscan river- 
meadows set about the white feet of angels! And Sav- 
onarola himself, in that quaint Roman seat of his that 
stands yet in his severe cell, — were his dreams not height- 
ened and his heart touched by those fragments of idealized 
earthly loveliness which Angelico had placed in everlast- 
ing brightness in that grey home of prayer ! 

And those Pre-Raphaelite starry meadows found a late 
reincarnation when Edward Burne-Jones — truly a mod- 
ern holy brother in gentleness and spiritual vision — and 
his friend the fine-souled Morris, created the fair work 
of their combined arts of design and loom-weaving, the 
tapestry with which they made more beautiful the fra- 
grant chapel of their own Exeter College. 

Yes, in these very fields about us here by the Brandy- 
wine I may live again in imagination and memory those 
rare hours in the Florentine shrine and in the Oxford sanc- 
tuary beneath the centuried windows of the silent Bod- 
leian Library. 



[31] 



SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE 



Sir William loved his life of lettered ease 
Among the shadows of his Surrey trees, 
Among his gardens and his books and bees ; — 
I love his memory that he loved all these. 

^" — j'UNE XXI 1 1. To go down into green Surrey to 
ffi* Farnham, sleepy old town on the pastoral Wey, 
and out to Moor Park and its old-world felic- 
ities, is to gain an abiding interest in one of England's 
finest types of old-time country gentleman. Further, if 
it be one's fortune, as it was mine, to find on a bookstall 
the four leather-clad octavos entitled The Works of Sir 
William Temple, Bart., with Lely's handsome portrait 
of the author, and printed in London in 1757, by Lintot, 
Tonson, and others of those rubicund booksellers of Pope's 
acquaintance, — his happiness will be complete. Some 
pleasant hours have I spent over these Works beside the 
Brandywine, only a few miles up-stream from the farms 
and gardens where Sir William's American descendants 
still live. In this region of ''blissful pastoral seclusion," 
as Bayard Taylor called his home-land, it seems fitting to 
say something of our noble author and his devotion to the 
country life. 

I take it that your true book-lover extends his affection 
very easily to old red-brick country mansions, to fragrant 
box hedges and old-fashioned flowers; he holds dear the 
very locusts that hum so drowsily in warm August noons, 
the sigh of the light summer wind among the beeches 

[32] 



Sir William Temple 



and soft evergreens, the red cherry leaves drifting across 
the orchard grass. He need only look into his heart, in 
order to v^^rite, with Cowley, 

"Ah, yet, ere I descend to the Grave, 
May I a small House and large Garden have, 
And a few Friends, and many Books, both true, 
Both wise, and both delightful, too!" 

To come upon Sir William Temple's essay, "Of Gar- 
dening," is like finding pale rose-petals between the pages 
of some cherished volume. This "sweet garden essay," 
as Charles Lamb termed it, recalls half-forgotten days of 
long ago in our grandmothers' gardens ; the songs of child- 
hood, the spicy pinks beside the wall, the old formal por- 
traits in the "best room" — such memories awake at the 
opening of one of these old books. And in our author's 
stately discourse, "Of Health and Long Life," I hear once 
again the staid Quakers — Temples and others — who around 
the "First-day" dinner exchanged advice on this same vital 
theme, seasoning their homely recipes with a certain flavor 
of old-time speech. To the boy beside them their words 
seemed formal and perhaps lacking in humor ; but his read- 
ing in sundry journals and epistles of seventeenth-century 
Quakers has since convinced him that those grave but 
cheery country folk spoke and wrote a diction that has 
come straight from the days of Penn and Temple, a dic- 
tion that is charming for its unfailing dignity, mingled 
with affectionate friendliness. Almost can I hear again 

the old, broad-brimmed, drab-coated J W of my 

boyish reverence as I read Sir William Temple's opening 
observation on Health : 

[33] 



Brandywine Days 



"Peace is a public blessing, without which no man is safe 
in his fortunes, his liberty, or his life. . . . Health is the 
soul that animates all enjoyments of life, which fade and are 
tasteless, if not dead, without it." 

Very cheery and affable a host and table companion 
was good Sir William, delighting In making those about 
him happy and easy; very skilful In avoiding disputes 
and In turning his conversation, as his sister avers, "to 
vv^hat was more easy and pleasant, especially at table, 
where, he said, 111 humour ought never to come, and his 
agreeable talk at it, If It had been set down, would have 
been very entertaining to the reader, as well as it was to 
so many that heard it. He had a very familiar way of 
conversing with all sorts of people, from the greatest 
p-rlnces to the meanest servants, and even children, whose 
imperfect language and natural and innocent talk he was 
fond of, and made entertainment out of everything that 
could afford it." 

Such pictures rise as I turn the pages of these old vol- 
umes of Temple's ^Vorks here by the Brandywine; and I 
am happy in believing that such a type of conservative, 
affable, friendly, democratic country gentleman is not a 
lost type, and that in some of these long-settled families 
among the ancient farms up and down the stream these 
noble characteristics still survive. 



[34] 



THEOCRITUS 



""O Singer of the field and fold, 
Theocritus! Pans pipe was thine, — 
Thine was the happier Age of Gold. 

''For thee the scent of new-turned mould. 
The bee-hives, and the murmuring pine, 
O Singer of the field and fold!" 

^ — I'UNE XXIV. Professor Palgrave once said that 
\^^ Keats' Ode to Autumn is such a poem as Theoc- 
ritus might have delighted to compose; and in- 
deed the lovely realism of Keats' perfect pastoral is in 
the best mode of the earlier singer, with its impassioned 
vision of Autumn's goddess drowsing beside the half- 
reaped furrow among twined flowers, or dreamily musing 
by the dripping cider-press, while all about are laden vines 
and apples blushing red, sweet nuts and unending wealth 
of September's golden flowers. With soft adagio of insect- 
swarms, bleat of sheep and twitter of homing swallows, 
the poem dies down like the close of some enchanting 
melody. Truly, Theocritus himself could not have re- 
ported the pensive hours of early autumn in southern 
England more faithfully, more tenderly! 

Conversely, we may well imagine with what exquisite 
report Keats might have immortalized afresh — could he 
have visited Sicily-^that land of ilex and iris, of mossy 
fountains and vineyards ages old, of wild roses and 
galingale and sleepy poppies, where the yellow spurge 

[35] 



Brandywine Days 



blooms in the lava rifts and the broken columns of antique 
temples are festooned with rose-vines, — that land where 
amid the countr5^side simplicity every shepherd is a natural 
poet and Daphnis and Lycidas still pipe on rustic flutes 
beside their straggling flocks. 

From Keats back through Browne of Tavistock, 
Spenser, and Lincolnshire's delightful Barnabe Googe, we 
might trace the slender silver stream of English pastoral 
lyric to its fountain-head in the eclogues of Virgil and 
his master Theocritus. Beyond the Sicilian we should deal 
with his teacher Philetas of Cos and with those idyllic 
poets of the Linus-song that pass vaguely across one page 
of the Iliad. But for us the earliest pastoral verse is the 
verse of Theocritus, in some ten of those thirty idyls or 
"little pictures" that bear his beautiful name. *'Who will 
open his doors," he asks, "and receive our Graces to his 
home?" Have not all the spiritual kinsfolk of the beloved 
Sicilian, from Virgil to Keats and Tennyson, received 
those Graces right warmly, loved and cherished them, and 
set them up as dear patron deities over the exquisite strains 
of the pastoral flute through all the ages? 

"Oh, easy access to the hearer's grace 
When Dorian shepherds sang to Proserpine! 

For she herself had trod Sicilian fields, 
She knew the Dorian water's gush divine, 

She knew each lily white which Enna yields, 
Each rose with blushing face; 
She loved the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain." 

Where breathe the Dorian pipe, the Dorian strain, 
more authentically than in that most ancient lament of 
Thyrsis for Daphnis the dead shepherd, composed in that 

[36] 



Theocritus 



soft later Doric dialect whereby Theocritus so faithfully 
reproduces the rural patois of his simple and friendly peas- 
ant folk? Like the sweet whispering of a pine-tree by a 
well of living water are the pipings of his mate the goat- 
herd, surpassed by Pan alone, — so avows Thyrsis. In re- 
turn, the goatherd likens the song of Thyrsis to the mel- 
ody of streams that fall forever from the clifiF. So, be- 
neath elm shadows and beside the homely wooden images 
of the gods of field and garden, these rustics ply their syl- 
van minstrels)^ The prize — a fair, two-handled drinking- 
cup — is portrayed with loving elaboration: a deep new- 
carven cup, engarlanded with ivy-twine about its brim, 
with honeysuckle and saffron fruitage. Engraved thereon 
standeth a damsel dreamy-sweet, round whom contend 
her fair-haired lovers. On another panel of the cup is 
carved an old fisherman, stoutly dragging his casting- 
net. Hard by, a lad looks upon two foxes that rob a 
vineyard ; he is plaiting a seemly cricket-trap, this lad, 
from corn and rushes, joyously working at the soft wicker 
mesh. Lissom briar entwines the goodly cup ; the prize 
has cost the goatherd a great white cheese; and all its vir- 
gin beauty shall belong to Thyrsis, if he will but chant his 
m.aster-song, the Death of Daphnis. 

Whereupon the shepherd invokes the muses of bucolic 
elegy, — "Begin, sweet Maids, begin the sylvan song!" — 
and then he chants of Daphnis, — Daphnis who now adown 
the mournful stream of forgetfulness hath gone forever, — 
Daphnis, dear to the deathless Muses, — Daphnis, whom 
Aphrodite, heavy of heart, lamented, — Daphnis, who nev- 
ermore by glen or glade or woodland green shall roam 
as of old, a joy to every creature of the field. 

[37] 



Brandy wine Days 



Thus soundeth the Death-song of Daphnis, prototype 
of every noble threnody of later ages. From that simple 
but highly artistic poem of the Sicilian shepherd-muse 
have come the inspiration and imagery of our great Eng- 
lish elegies. The wailing grief, the yearning iteration of 
the dead shepherd's name, find echo in Spenser's lament 
for Sidney, 

"Young Astrophel, the pride of shepherds praise, 
Young Astrophel, the rusticke lasses love; 
Far passing all the pastors of his dales." 

They echo immortally in the melancholy verses of the 
uncouth swain who sang to the oaks and rills his grief for 
Lycidas, 

"dead ere his prinne, 
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer." 

And how Shelley touched the Dorian flute, like a sec- 
ond Theocritus, in those unforgetable op,ening lines! — 

"I weep for Adonais — he is dead! 
Oh weep for Adonais ! tho' our tears 
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head ! . . . 
Oh weep for Adonais — he is dead ! 
Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep !" 



[38] 







5- 



THE BRAND YWINE AT SLUMBERVILLE 

JUNE XXV 

'DOWN the dales of green Newlln, 
Among the peaceful farms it flows, 
And soft and dreamy is the song 
It chants and murmurs as it goes 
Beside the woodland cool and still, 
The Brandywine at Slumberville. 

Where blow the freshening winds of June 

Across the green and silver oats, 
And in the fragrant clover fields 

The robins trill their faery notes, 
It drifts below the emerald hill 
That guards old drowsy Slumberville. 

Its clear green waters softly sing 

Among the green and waving reeds, 

They softly sing among the stems 
Of green and crimson water-weeds, 

They softly sing beside the mill 

And dark mill-race at Slumberville. 

By daisied meadows deep and sweet 

Where tranquil cattle dream and dream, 

Our little river rambles on 

Full-fed by many a tribute stream; 

O how its gleam and beauty fill 

My vision of old Slumberville! 

[39] 



Brandy wine Days 



By homes where honest folk and true 
Have lived for generations long 

Among their golden gardens old, 
It wanders down with sleepy song, 

By smithy and by rumbling mill. 

The Brandywine at Slumberville. 

I hear its music faery-sweet 
Beneath the silver stars of June, 

I hear its melancholy voice 

Beneath the yellow harvest moon 

Grieving that autumn frosts must fill 

The golden dales of Slumberville. 

O never comes to me the song 
Of thrushes in the poppied wheat, 

Or under shadowy orchard boughs 
The ring of childish laughter sweet. 

But thy rich music haunts me still, 

O Brandywine at Slumberville! 



[40] 



DEVONSHIRE IDYLS 



TUNE XXVI. ''In Tamar's valley Contentment 

ffl- has found a haunt. At set of sun, when these 
clay banks glow and the murmuring shallows 
gleam with fire; when the voice of the water is a thanks- 
giving stealing upward and the harmonious murmur of 
those things that only rivers know; then Content moves 
along the dewy grasses, and dreams beside the silent pools. 
In the gloaming hour I have divined her presence on Ta- 
mar's dark brink." 

Such words might well describe our Brandywine in its 
prevalent mood of tranquillity; they are from Eden Phill- 
potts' delightful book of prose idyls, My Devon Year, — 
a nature-book of true charm of minute observation, not 
loaded down with arid science, but alive with fine and 
affectionate sympathy for the outdoor world in antique 
Devonshire. Many an hour by the Brandywine has this 
new author shared a place with Walton and with Jeffer- 
ies. His volume of reveries deals, as Jefferies' might have 
dealt, with the wild life and flowers, the quaint folk and 
the hoary memorials of the loveliest of the counties of 
southwestern England. He pleads for an intimate love 
of God's beautiful world. Those who are blind to this 
love have "never lived alone with the earth. They never 
felt Nature touch their hearts to patience, lift their unrest 
call them clear-voiced to braver life and more 
courageous thinking." 

Old Devonshire gave us the fine pastoral poet William 
Browne, whose exquisite pictures of old-time shepherd 

[41] 



Brandy wine Days 



life proved so captivating to the young Keats. Brov^^ne 
sang v^^ith simple zest of the 

"jocund crew of youthful swains 
Wooing their sweetings with delicious strains, 
Harvest folks, with curds and clouted cream, 
With cheese and butter, cakes and cates enow, 
That are the yeoman's from the yoke or cow." 

One may understand the Brandywine's rustic charm 
with a deeper appreciation after reading Browne's Britan- 
nia's Pastorals. 

And Devonshire gave us the immortal Coleridge; 
above all, the ancient shire gave us the golden lyrics of 
rare old Herrick. A fragrant chapter of Phillpotts' vol- 
ume was written in the graveyard of Robert Herrick's 
church ; and I envy him the joy of having read the match- 
less Hesperides amid the very scenes of their composition. 
"I had sooner read him here and now, amid the life and 
scent of the things he loved. . . . The hock-cart has van- 
ished, the song of the wakers is still, and the maypole 
rises no more upon the village green ; but youth and love, 
red dawn and golden twilight, dew and rain, and the 
buds of spring, are immortal . . . welcome now to 
us as then to him, whose dust lies near my footsteps in 
this musical resting-place of the dead." 



[42] 



MORNING RAIN 



"Co?ne thou, and brim the meadow streams. 
And soften all the hills with mist, 
O falling dew! from burning dreams 

By thee shall herb and flower be kissed; 
And Earth shall bless thee yet again, 
O gentle, gentle summer rain!" 

^^-rUNE XXVII. Rain is falling in fitful gusts and 
kA* flaws, and the ring-dove is heard only in those in- 
tervals of sunshine that make the lawn's deep turf 
shine with twinkling drops, and the white cattle gleam 
among the meadow buttercups. Behind the sombre, an- 
cient House the golden-honeysuckle is bright, and beyond 
its rich masses three perfect roses sway on long graceful 
stems. 

"O crimson roses bending in the rain !" 

The farm lads hang idly about the cow-sheds, glad 
to know that the timothy hay is all safely under roof, and 
talking of the wheat that will be ready for cutting "next 
Saturday, or mebbe not till Monday or Tuesday — there's 
no tellin'." The braver of our bird-friends pipe undaunted 
now and then, and close to the trunk of the purple beech 
a robin is sheltering himself from the showers, and watch- 
ing the weather with his head knowingly cocked on one 
side. 

'"Dear little fellow ! though skies may be dreary, 
Nothing cares he while his heart is so cheery." 
[43] 



Brandy wine Days 



It is a morning for meditation; and gazing out across 
hill after green hill fading impalpably in rainy distance, I 
think with affection of this ancient Pennsylvania shire, 
dear to the heart of every child of her: — 

Old Chester County, — land of our delight, 
Founded and watched by Penn, here in the wilds 
Of his wide Commonwealth, in those far days 
That now so ancient seem and so remote, 
So dim with all the mist of vanished years: 
Dear Chester County, — loved of all thy sons, 
And best, I think, by those who forth have gone 
From out thy borders, who around their hearths, 
In twilight hours when sentiment awakes 
And old remembrance warms the lonely heart. 
Speak fondly of thy woodlands and thy hills; 
Thy meadows musical with harvest cheer ; 
Thy long white barns where o'er the odorous mows 
The never-resting swallows sweep and sweep ; 
Thy drowsy hamlets where the blacksmith's stroke, 
Measured and clear, is ofttimes the sole sound 
That breaks the quiet calm ; thy breezy uplands 
Browsed o'er by lazy cows and fleecy sheep. 
And, best of all, thy softly-flowing stream. 
Thy Stream of Beauty, — silver Brandywine. 

Thy pleasant name, old Shire, from English vales, 
There in the west by winding Dee, was brought ; 
And truly, of all tracts in our broad land. 
These meadows soft and wooded hills most seem 
Like those of ancient pastoral Cheshire there 
In old-world England. 

[44] 



Morning Rain 



And thy townships, too, 
Pennsbury, Nottingham and Fallowfield, 
Bradford and Warwick and the Coventries, — 
Their names are redolent of England's fields 
And England's ancient thorpes and manor-lands. 
And green Newlin, two centuries ago 
Settled and 'stablished by an Irish squire, 
The friend of noble Penn, — green-hilled Newlin, 
That, with old Drumore in the sister shire 
Of Lancaster, my heart hath ever loved, 
Rich in ancestral memories as they are, — 
Their names I here inscribe with filial hand. 



[45] 



A WORLD OF GREEN 



''Ohj soft the streams drop music 

Between the hills. 
And inusical the birds' nests 

Beside those rills; 
The nests are types of home 

Love-hidden from ills. 
The nests are types of spirits 

Love-music fills J^ 

UNE XXVIII. Lovely this valley of ours after 



U 



rain 



The harvesters drew in the last of their early 
hay last evening, and so could lie contentedly beneath the 
rafters vs^hile the summer storm raged through the night. 
All morning the wraiths of rain slanted across the land- 
scape, — a vaporous silver veil ; and the Brandywine rose 
with the flood of waters that rushed down every folding 
of its hundred hills. This late afternoon the sun has 
come out palely through sailing clouds, and the wide vale 
swims in misty gold. 

We climbed the hill behind the apple trees and gazed 
long on the enchanting scene, — luscious meadows edged 
with tufted willows, reddening wheat fields, great rounded 
slopes of shorn hay-lands, and on many a far hilltop the 
shadowy, dreaming woodlands. Never have we seen such 
variety of soft green tints, — the uplands with their "pure 
light warm green" that Rossetti thought most lovable, the 
silvery emerald of half-ripe oats swaying in the fragrant 

[46] 



A World of Green 



breeze, the liquid green of water-meads whose rushes and 
wild grasses are perpetually moist, the exquisite hazy- 
green of bending water-willows, and the strange shining 
green of the young corn. In the meadows were scattered 
little pools, limpid and glassy and rainy-green, like those 
mysterious waters that gleam from the background of 
Leonardo's pictures. As Alice Brown has it, 

"Lucent lagoons lie here berimmed with foam." 

There was that in the vivid freshness of the landscape, 
blown over by the soft evening winds, odorous of sweet, 
moist hay, that suggested a scene along some river of Nor- 
mandy or Old Provence in one of the lovely paintings of 
Corot. Thinking in this vein, and turning over this even- 
ing some prints of the great dreamer's works, I dwell 
especially on his Dance of Nymphs, Evening. 

I muse before a landscape of Corot, 

Wherein the Painter doth express 

With soft, ideal loveliness 

All that his loving heart would have us know, 

All that his Toving eye hath seen. 

In this old-world idyllic dale, 

Where silvery vapors pale 

Hang o'er the little copse of tenderest green. 

And from the flowery turf 

Whose half-blown roses toss like faery surf. 

Fair sisterhoods of slendor poplars rise, 

Birches and tremulous aspens, delicate trees. 

Diaphanous, vague and cool, — 

While by the soft marge of the woodland pool, 

[47] 



Brandy wine Days 



Clear-sculptured on the saffron evening skies, 
Sweet dryad forms sway in the breeze, 
Sway, — and veer, — and softly sing 
Enchanted harmonies to greet the Spring. 



[48] 



AMONG THE GOLDEN WHEAT 

JUNE XXIX 

XN these last hours of happy-hearted June, 
When dewy clover-heads their fragrance spill, 
When all the morn and drowsy afternoon 
The clear, pure sunshine sleeps on mead and hill, 
On orchards old and gardens green and still, 

To bless with fertile heat, — 
What joy to wander to some shady height 
Where field on field lies spread before the sight, 
And muse all day among the golden wheat ! 

Across the valley go the laden teams, 

Piled to the ladder's top with sweet, light hay, 
There where the Brandywine ensilvered gleams 
As by low willowed banks it makes its way. 
In far-off daisy fields as white as they 

The young lambs softly bleat; 
And little children through the happy hours 
By yonder wood are gathering pale wild-flowers. 
While I do naught but muse among the wheat. 

How pleasant and delightful is it here, 

Through this long, fragrant, languid day of June, 

To watch the farmers at their harvest cheer 

With merry converse and with whistled tune, — 
To see them share their simple stores at noon 

'Neath some old tree's retreat; — 
To see the cattle with dark eyes a-dream 

[49] 



Brandy wine Days 



Wade in the cooling currents of the stream, 

While I do naught but muse among the wheat! 

Great snowy clouds are drifting down the sky, 

And o'er the silence of the noon-tide hush 
I hear the locust's languorous, hot cry; 

From out the green depths of yon pendent bush 
There pours the lyric music of the thrush ; 

And from this shady seat 
I see the farmer's boys among the corn 
Where they have toiling been since early morn, 
While I do naught but muse among the wheat. 

By mossy fences of this upland farm 

The old sweet-briar rose is twining wild ; 
Dear flower, its old-time fragrance hath a charm 
To wake forgotten thoughts and memories mild 
Of those far years when as a pensive child 

I came with wandering feet 
To plucTc these flowers, or ramble hand in hand 
With him who never more across this land 
May gaze or muse among the golden wheat. 

Lo, while I dream, the wind stirs in the leaves, — 

And hath this lovely day so quickly flown ? 
The harvesters have left the yellow sheaves, 
And I am here upon the hills alone; 
One sad ring-dove with melancholy moan 

The vesper-hour doth greet. 
Across the fields the sun is going down. 
It gilds the steeples of the distant town, 

And I must cease to muse among the wheat. 

[50] 



Among the Golden Wheat 

Old Chester County, land of peaceful dales, 

Of misty hills and shadow-haunted woods, — 
I love the silence of thy pastoral vales, 
The music of thy Brandywine that broods 
And dreams through leafy summer solitudes 

With murmurs dim and sweet. 
All my child-heart, all glamour of old days, 
Awake when thus I walk thy country ways 
And muse in June among the golden wheat! 



[51] 



AN OLD-WORLD POET 



^ — I'UNE XXX. In his book of cheery maxims, Sorne 
ffl' Fruits of Solitude, William Penn says: "The 
Country Life is to be preferr'd, for there we see 
the works of God . . . the Country is both the 
Philosopher's Garden and his Library ... a Sweet 
and Natural Retreat from Noise and Talk, and allows 
opportunity for Reflection." 

Henry Vaughan, like Robert Herrick, belongs to the 
line of authors who find their inspiration amid the country- 
side seclusion praised by William Penn. A son of that 
wondrous century which gave us Herrick and Penn and 
many another elect soul, Vaughan had the angelic vision 
and childlike naivete of his age. His finest verses adorn 
every anthology, as, — 

"I saw Eternity the other night 

Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, 

All calm as it was bright;" 

and his splendid recalling of friends lost from earth, in a 
poem which Lowell held dear, — 

"They are all gone into the world of light! 
And I alone sit ling'ring here! 
Their very memory is fair and bright. 
I see them walking in an Air of glory;" 

and his poem, "The Retreate," which Wordsworth echoed 
in the noble "Intimations of Immortality." Not very far 
from the days of monkish penance and abasement was the 
poet who could make this avowal, — 

[52] 



An Old- World Poet 



"Happy those early dayes, when I 
Shin'd in my Angell-infancy ! 
Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race, 
Or taught my soul to fancy aught 
But a white, Celestial thought. . 
When on some gilded Cloud or floivre 
My gazing soul would dwell an houre, 
And in those weaker glories spy 
Some shadows of eternity." 

From Vaughan's book, Silex Scintillans, or Sacred 
Poems and Private Ejaculations, come his best-known 
things. The precious little volume is dated 1650, the year 
after Robert Herrick gave his golden Hesperides to the 
world; thus yielding proof that, as to the Devonshire 
vicarage came no rumble of the Cromwell cannon, so the 
clangors of those tragic days were unheard in the village 
of South Wales where Henry Vaughan me4itated his holy 
and contented muse. 

Like most Welsh youth of the gentler class, our poet 
attended Jesus College, Oxford. His family was an 
ancient one; two of his ancestors laid down their lives at 
Agincourt, and two of the family figure in Shakespeare's 
historical plays. The young poet, then, would find the 
way open for him to Oxford's choicest company; indeed, 
he seems to have matched verses with the university wits, 
for we find among his earlier songs the usual protestations 
to Amoret, to Fida, and to Etesia. Fida's eyes, he de- 
clares, are "like twinkling stars," her breath "as sweet as 
new-blown roses." To Etesia he sings, with premoni- 
tions of his rare later fancy, — 

[53] 



Brandy wine Days 



"Thou art the dark world's raorning-star, 
Seen only, and seen but from far; 
Where, like astronomers, we gaze 
Upon the glories of thy face." 

Vaughan's book is one for reading in quiet hours of 
summer mornings, in rose-bowered arbors or under green 
willows beside a cool stream. Thus it is that I turn now 
and then to this old-world book of the Welsh poet. 



[54] 



NATURE^S HEALING 



JULY II 

''Above all vocal sons of men. 
To Wordsworth be my homage, thanks, and love,'* 

V^^HE tired city and the hot-breathed streets, 
V^V The little children sad and wistful-eyed, 

Pale, weary mothers, all the hopeless throng 
That crowd the stifling courts and alleys dark, 
Cheated of beauty, doomed to toil and plod 
Year in, year out, in endless poverty 
And seemingly forgotten of their God, — 
These passed from sight but not from memory, 
As forth I journeyed by wide-spreading lawns 
And lavish homes of luxury, and saw 
Extravagance, display, and worldly pomp. 
And joyless people striving hard for joy. 
I grieved for those sad children and the throngs 
Pent in hot city walls; I grieved for these 
Unthinking devotees of pride and show. 
What medicine is there, what healing power, — 
I mused, — to calm and soothe these suffering hearts 
Stifled by poverty or dulled by wealth ? 
Is there no anodyne to heal them all. 
No gift from God to lift them and console 
And bring again the golden age to men ? 

Lo, turning to the loved and friendly page 
Of Wordsworth's book beside me on the grass 
[55] 



Brandywine Days 



By silver Brandywine's Arcadian stream, 
I read how "Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her ; 'tis her privilege, 
Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
From joy to joy; for she can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues. 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life. 
Shall e'er prevail against us or disturb 
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings." 



[56] 



BOOK-HUNTING IN LONDON 

''O to hunt books 
In the Charing Cross Road!" 
JULY VI 

HOOKING over my well-worn and best-loved old 
volumes this long rainy day, I am filled with 
many a memory of the places and times of ac- 
quiring these silent and faithful comrades. Those brought 
over-sea from book-shops in the Old World, — from 
Oxford and London, from the market-place in Verona, 
from ancient Strasburg, — possess their own charm. Most 
fascinating of all book-stalls are those of old London! 

There is indeed no winter of discontent for one who 
goes book-hunting in Holborn and Charing Cross Road. 
The fog may be dense and the street lamps dim at noon- 
day, but for him who plies the delightful quest of old 
volumes the soft yellow haze adds a glamor and seems 
to shut him up in his own little sphere in deepest con- 
tentment of heart. Very near to Charles Lamb did I feel 
while idling in Booksellers' Row in late wintry after- 
noons. This old thoroughfare — now unhappily *'im- 
proved" out of existence — lay somewhere near the route 
from the Temple to Christ's Hospital ; and I doubt not 
that the young Charles found himself often there as he 
passed from cloister to cloister. Along these antique 
streets and by-ways, where clustered old book stalls, 
Charles Lamb may have had his early taste for leather- 
clad folios made the keener. He had long before been 
tumbled into the spacious closets of good old English 

[57] 



Brandy wine Days 



reading in the library of Samuel Salt, Esq., and had 
browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pastur- 
age. In Booksellers' Row he might have found — as he 
later found at the Bodleian Library — the odor of old 
moth-scented coverings of folios and quartos as fragrant 
as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew 
amid the happy orchards. 

Old Books are best! I confess to that belief. Why 
else did I put aside the prim little Shakespeares in their 
fresh green leather, in the showy Holborn shop, and buy 
the old Malone variorum edition of 1803 in Booksellers' 
Row? Books associate themselves for us with the places 
where we bought them and the places where we read 
them. These old Shakespeares forever recall that yellow 
fog and that ancient stall on a certain December after- 
noon. The notes may not discuss the latest German 
theory of Hamlet's madness, but they are delightfully 
ample and leisurely, covering mostly the greater part of 
the page; and their obsolete wisdom is always vouched 
for by Malone, or Johnson, or Steevens, or T. Warton, 
or other old-time editors. Hardly will you meet with 
such a world of quaint annotation, save in Dr. Furness' 
generous pages, where the droll, strange editors of the 
Eighteenth Century find so kindly a welcome. Old Books 
are best! I think it, as I inhale the fragrance of the 
stout pages and caress the tarnished tree-calf covers of 
these twenty-one worn volumes of Shakespeare's Plays. 

The folio of Spenser, whose epic Sir Walter Scott 
avowed he could read forever, and whom Lowell 
ranked along with Marlowe, his earliest favorite — Spen- 
ser's noble folio here on my desk has a singularly precious 

' [58] 



Book-Hunting i?i London 

association connected with it, for it was bought imme- 
diately after I came from the stately funeral of Lord 
Tennyson. The linking of the two august poets in this 
way has meant an added joy in the persual of my copy 
of Spenser ever since that day. *'No writer ever found 
a nearer way to the heart than he," thought Theophilus 
Gibber. I hold myself a Spenserian; and fortified by 
Keats and Scott and Lowell and Gibber, I shall continue 
to cherish and applaud Spenser's noble idealism and un- 
matchable melody to the end. It is no mere fancy that 
makes those solemn services in the Abbey, and the dreamy 
hum of the old London streets — that **mery London," 
Spenser's "most kyndly nurse" — rise in memory in the 
happy summer hours that find me lingering over the 
"Shepheards Galender" or ''The Faerie Queene" in this 
treasureable volume. 

A few dollars will go a long way among London book- 
stalls. Little Eighteenth century editions of The Spec- 
tator, and of Pope and Gray and Gowper, may often be 
picked up for sixpence a volume. The flavor of antiquity 
clings to them; old names of former owners, and choice 
old faded book-plates, enrich the fly-leaves; the curious 
antiquated notes and the quaint type carry one back to 
the days of Queen Anne and the early Georges. One 
reads and reads these dear delightful books with a gusto 
that no recently published editions can ever give. 

''By ?fiy troth, here's an excellent comfortable book; 
it's most sweet reading in it'' — how often may one ex- 
claim thus, with old Dekker! 



[59] 



**OLD FISHING AND WISHING'^ 

''Then come, my friend, forget your foes, 

and leave your fears behind. 
And wander forth to try your luck, 

with cheerful, quiet mind; 
For be your fortune great or small, 

you II take what God may give. 
And all the day your heart shall say, 

' 'Tis luck enough to live/" 

^ ^ULY VII. Twenty years ago the Brandywine was 
ki- an excellent stream for bass-fishing, I well re- 
member the patient elderly anglers who would 
sit beneath our willows and watch their corks the day long, 
turning homeward at evenfall w^ith choice strings of Jaass. 
And when the stream was unusually clear, we could sp} 
these dark fish down in the cool water above the smooth 
sand-beds, 

Now v/innowing the water with clear gills, 
Now darting with a flash of purple fin 
Far into watery shades and silent homes 
Of willow roots beneath the sedgy bank, 
Or shadowy chambers in the sunless rocks. 
But, recently, the German carp have been introduced 
by some enterprizing citizens, and as a result the bass have 
yielded ground, or, rather, water, — to the intruders. Save 
for "them six big bass" that an ancient villager boasts of 
having "ketched" in the stream last summer, I have not 
heard of a haul of these fine and lamented beauties for 

[60] 



''Old Fishmg and Wishing' 

many a day. The carp have the Brandywine almost to 
themselves, and we can see them, — large w^hitish fellows, 
— vaulting out of the water daily. But are the carp ogres 
among the fish tribes, driving out the finer sorts? I can 
fancy the alarm of the young fall-fish and the baby bass 
when one of these big-eyed, leathery monsters comes sweep- 
ing in among their innocent schools. How they must flee 
in consternation to their mothers' sheltering fins! So I 
think that, with the coming in of the carp and the going 
out of the bass, we have fallen on evil days. 

Yet one cannot but feel some tenderness for the in- 
truders, when he fin4s honest Walton averring that "the 
Carp is a stately, a good, and a subtle fish, a fish that hath 
not (as it is said) been long in England but said to be by 
one Mr. Mascall (a Gentleman then living at Pluinsted 
in Sussex) brought into this Nation." 

Rambling along agreeably with his carp-lore, the gen- 
tle Izaak informs his pupil "that they breed more nat- 
urally in Ponds then in running waters, and that those 
that live in Rivers are taken by men of the best palates 
to be much the better meat." 

The carp is by all odds the most considerable and 
stately of our Brandywine fish ; not even our old villager's 
generous imagination can raise a bass to the proportions of 
a full-grown carp. In triumph let me quote from the 
Compleat Angler in support of my statement to doubting 
relatives as to the "great and goodly fish" I saw leaping 
and lunging in the shallows the other day: — 

"The Carp, if he have water room and good feed, will 
grow to a very great bigness and length: I have heard, 
to above a yard long; though I never saw one above thirty 

[61J 



Brandy wine Days 



three inches, which was a very great and goodly fish." Ah, 
dear old Piscator, of what a *'tryed honestie" dost thou 
approve thyself in thy cautious phrase "I have heard" ! 

Walton, naively enough, recommends "hope and pa- 
tience" to the angler for carp: — "I have knowne a very 
good Fisher angle diligently four or six hours in a day, 
for three or four dayes together for a River Carp, and not 
have a bite." 

What a picture arises at the words, — philosophic old 
men dozing beside their poles under shady willows, seem- 
ing a veritable part of the sleepy Sussex or Staffordshire 
landscape itself! Few such long-enduring anglers, it is 
to be feared, would old Izaak discover on our side of the 
Atlantic, unless he could perchance awake in some such 
quiet corner as one of our Brandywine valleys. 

Of baits for the carp there be many, says he, "of 
worms I think the blewish Marsh or Meadow worm is 
best." But the fisherman who hunts vainly for a worm 
of the proper "blewish" tint, may find comfort in Pisca- 
tor's generous alternative, — "but possibly another worm 
not too big may do as well, and so may a Gentle; and as 
for Pastes, there are almost as many sorts as there are 
Medicines for the Toothach." 

And for our Brandywine carp-fishers, — degenerates 
from the good old bass-days! — let me give Walton's clos- 
ing counsel, — which I have always thought one of the 
gems from his "sweet Socratic lip": — 

"And if you fish for a Carp with Gentles, then put 
upon your hook a small piece of Scarlet about this bigness 
n , it being soked in, or anointed with Oyle of Peter, 
called by some, Oyl of the Rock; and if your Gentles 

[62J 



''Old Fishing and JVishing' 

be put two or three dayes before Into a box or horn 
anointed with Honey, and so put upon j^our hook, as to 
preserve them to be living, you are as like to kill this 
craftie fish this way as any other; but still as you are fish- 
ing, chaw a little white or brown bread in your mouth, 
and cast it into the Pond about the place where your 
flote swims. Other baits there be, but these with dili- 
gence, and patient watchfulness, will do it as well as any 
as I have ever practised, or heard of; and yet I shall tell 
you, that the crumbs of white bread and honey made into 
a Paste, is a good bait for a Carp, and you know it is more 
easily made." 

O for the sweet, serene philosophy of this long-dead 
"Brother of the Angle," who basked contentedly in the 
sunshine and had a *'pitie" for "poor-rich men," "men 
that are condemn'd to be rich, and always discontented, 
or busie"! How few of us to-day can say, with this old 
Seventeenth-Century sage, that "we enjoy a contented- 
nesse above the reach of such dispositions" ! 

*'What trout shall coax the rod of yore 
In Itchen stream to dip? 
What lover of her banks restore 
That siveet Socratic lip? 
Old fishing and 'wishing 
Are over many a year." 

Thus wrote Louise Imogen Guiney, whose affinity for 
Walton and Vaughan and other worthies of the old Cav- 
alier days makes her their "verie fitte" interpreter. 

If I add a paragraph that has naught to do with my 
theme, — the Carp, — I may plead the example of that de- 

[63] 



Bra?tdywine Days 



lightful follower of side-paths, Charles Lamb. I cannot 
refrain from copying out of my Compleat Angler (a port- 
ly little volume, secured from that last of old-fashioned 
book-sellers, Bernard Quaritch, in Piccadilly) a presenta- 
tion-letter which I found in the Bodleian Library copy of 
the fifth edition ( 1676) of Walton's quaint book. 

"For Mrs. Wallop 

"I think I did some years past lend you a booke of 
Angling: This is printed since and I think better; 
And because nothing that I can pretend a tytell too, 
can be too good for you pray accept of this also, from 
me that am really 

''Madam 
"Yor most affectionate friend 

"And, most humble servant 

"Izaak Walton." 



[64] 



OLD HILLS MY BOYHOOD KNEW 



JULY VIII 

I 

HOULD I not hold them dear, 
These harvest-laden hills around me here, 
Old hills my boyhood knew, 

Green hills beneath what skies of blue ! — 

Hills looking over fields with deep peace crowned, 

Peaceful, beloved, ancestral ground. 

Who would not count it joy 

To roam the hills he roamed a happy boy! 

II 

Far off I see the men among the wheat; 

The ox-teams, patient, slow; 

The heavy sheaves piled up in yellow row; 

I hear the field-lark's carol sweet, 

The blackbird's gipsy call; 

I see the tasselled corn-fields smile 

For mile on emerald mile, 

And cattle browsing under oak-trees tall 

In meadows starred with tender flowers. 

The long rich summer hours 

Are none too long on this green height, 

Beneath these gnarled old cherry trees 

Where many a charming sight 

Enchants me, — where the balmy breeze, 

[65] 



Brandywine Days 



This dreamy summer day, 

Comes odorous from hills of hay 

And fields of ripening oats, — 

Where great cloud-shadows slowly pass 

Across the waving grass, — 

Where upward from the valley softly floats 

The song of children wading there 

In plashing waters silvery and cool, 

Like oreads beside a forest pool 

With dark and streaming hair. 

Ill 

Across the landscape with low drowsy song 

And golden flash and gleam, 

Behold how happily our winding stream, 

Our Stream of Beauty, flows along! — 

Now under pendent boughs of silent woods 

'Mid leafy solitudes. 

Now rushing over rocks set long ago 

By Indian anglers in gigantic row. 

Now flowing w^here the flossy heifers feed 

And white sheep nibble slow 

In many a deep-grassed solitary mead. 

Now winding under willow-bordered banks 

Where lilies grow in yellow ranks 

And water-weeds nod o'er the placid stream 

Wrapt all in sleepy dream. 

IV 

O these are sights to make the pulses glow, 
To touch with magic power, 

[fi6] 



Old Hills My Boyhood Ki 



?iew 



To waken memories of long ago 

And many a long-lost summer hour! 

— Old harvest-laden hills around me here, 

Should I not hold you dear, 

Old hills my boyhood knew, 

Green hills beneath those skies of blue! 



[67J 



THE CHILDREN 



"All heaven hath dreamed and smiled 
In the sweet face of a child/' 

^ — I'ULY IX. "Put the children into your Hour- 
\^' Glass," urges my Celtic friend, he whose heart 
is ever tender towards his own and all other win- 
some little folk. Yes, I reply, — but can you tell me by 
what magic one can express a tithe of the sunshine and 
charm and ineffable loveliness of childhood? 

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy," 

says the magnificent Ode over whose creation Wordsworth 
pondered for well-nigh the Horatian period. Surely, we 
must leave to Blake and Wordsworth and Stevenson the 
portrayal of the eternal joy and artlessness of the child- 
heart. 

The sweet seriousness and unconscious depth of char- 
acter so often seen in the clear faces of children have at- 
tracted many a poet's wonder. Dinah Mulock Craik has 
described "A Child's Smile", — 

"A child's smile, — nothing more; 

Quiet, and soft, and grave, and seldom seen. 
Like summer lightning o'er, 

Leaving the little face again serene." 

And how quaint and bonny is this stanza from Hugh 
Miller's Scotch poem, ''The Babie"! 

[68] 



T'he Child?^en 



"Her een sae like her mither's een, 
Twa gentle, liquid things; 
Her face is like an angel's face — 
We're glad she has nae wings!" 

This beautiful ethical view of child-life, that sees the 
innocent soul shining through the little wistful face, dates 
from a century ago, when Wordsworth, radiant with 
spiritual vision and all the freshness of high poetic youth, 
was giving forth his exquisite lines in portrayal of real 
or ideal maidenhood, — 

"Her's the silence and the calm 
Of mute, insensate things!" — 

"Beauty born of murmuring sound 
Shall pass into her face;" — 

"She seem'd a thing that could not feel 
The touch of earthly years;" — 

"A face with gladness overspread; 
Soft smiles, by human kindness bred;" — 

lines, it seems to me, matchless for their simple beauty 
and spiritual pathos. Yet matchless as they are, they 
find no mean echo in the utterance of later singers, 
as when Lowell writes of his daughter, — 

"I know not how others saw her, 
But to me she was wholly fair, 
And the light of the heaven she came from 
Still lingered and gleamed in her hair," — 

or when Frederick Locker thus addresses his winsome 
child: 

[69] 



Brandywine Days 



"Your calm, blue eyes have a far-off reach. 

Look at me with those wondrous eyes. 
Why are we doomed to the gift of speech 

While you are silent and sweet and wise? 
You have much to learn; you have more to teach, Baby mine." 

So with scores of simple and tender lyrics of childhood. 
One could fill many a page with the fair little child-songs 
of old Herrick, the whimsical fantasies of Lewis Carroll, 
the sadly beautiful threnodies of Elizabeth Chapman for 
a lost boy. Charles Tennyson-Turner's sonnet should not 
be forgotten, telling how little Letty fondly patted her 
toy globe, — 

"And while she hid all England with a kiss, 
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair;" — 

nor that grave, sweet elegy of our American laureate of 
childhood, James Whitcomb Riley, — 

"And this is the way the baby Flept; 

A mist of tresses backward thrown 
By quivering sighs where kisses crept 

With yearnings she had never known ; 
The little hands were closely kept 

About a lily newly blown 
And God was with her. And we wept — 

And this is the way the baby slept." 

Here, by the old flag-paven porch, sits little Brown- 
Eyes, blowing bubbles; she is enthralled by the perfect 
spheres of iridescent film that float so faerily from the 
pipe, hover an instant, and then fail into nothingness. The 
evanescence of these strangely fascinating water-balls is 
an emblem of the charm of children's ways, their tears 

[70] 



The Children 



and smiles that chase each other like the rains and suns 
of April. 

Last evening, in the gathering twilight, I watched a 
bonny little maiden and her blue-eyed cousins flitting 
among the evergreens and the half-shut roses. Like spir- 
its they seemed in the shadowy air, ethereal forms, — like 
those of which the Greeks dreamed, and which people the 
silvery glades of Corot's forest-sides. At last, wearied with 
their frolic, they came and asked for a story, — they who 
had been acting there, with sweet grace and abandon, a 
Greek pastorale of thirty centuries ago, — calling poor me 
from my reverie and seeking the consolation of a twilight 
tale that could be to their innocent drama but as clay to 
fine gold ! Ah, little ones, what unsuspected power and 
fascination is yours! 

And now in the sweet shadowy hour they troop off to- 
wards the house, like homing birds seeking the nest, and 
they are chanting as they go the favorite song of little 
Bunny, — the jocund refrain of Autolycus, — 



"Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way, 

And merrily hent the stile-a ; 

A merry heart goes all the day. 

Your sad tires in a mile-a." 



[71] 



OLD-TIME ECLOGUES 



"And asked who thee forth did bring, 
A shepheards swaine, saye, did thee sing 
All as his straying flocke he fedde." 

^ — J'ULY X. Looking over some notes of browsings 
ffM- among the pastoral poets of England, I revive this 
afternoon my devotion to the earlier eclogues; and 
mine ancient friend Barnabe Googe seems to sound his 
rural pipes among our green Brandyvv^Ine meadows. 

Some sixteen years before Spenser, prince of the pasto- 
ral muse, made use of the term "eclogue," It was appro- 
priated by Googe, whose own quaint name smacks of home- 
ly shepherding and rustic revelry. In his engaging little 
book, Eglogs, EpytapheSj and Sonnettes, of 1563, our Bar- 
nabe writes with old-fashioned joy In country comforts, as 
In this very charming shepherd avowal : 

"Menalcas best we nowe departe, 

my Cottage us shall keepe, 
For there is rowme for the, and me, 

and eke for all our sheepe: 
Som Chestnuts have I there in store 

with Cheese and pleasaunt whaye, 
God sends me Vittayles for my nede, 

and I synge Care awaye." 

Ere yet the silver Avon knew the boy Shakespeare and 
his love for the Idyllic countryside, Barnabe Googe was 
sounding his tuneful oat and essaying his old-world melo- 
dies by Lincolnshire fields and hedgerows. And with all 

[72] 



Id-Time Eclogues 



his English rural flavor, he was not forgetful of the 
nomenclature of the ancient bucolic poets, for his eight 
''Eglogs" yield such old familiar shepherd names as 
Daphnes, Amintas, Dametas, Menalcas, Melibeus, Corl- 
don, Silvanus, — an Arcadian company, surely! 

The elaborate and delightful recording of rustic de- 
bates and meditations, which renders so memorable a 
charm In Edmund Spenser's pastorals, harks back to the 
earlier and simpler poet. Thus the venerable Amintas, in 
Egloga Prima, closes his homely discourse in this wise: 

"And thus an end, I weryed am, 

my wynde is olde, and faynt; 
Such matters I do leave to suche, 

as finer farre can paint, 
Fetche in the Gote that goes astraye, 

and dryve hym to the folde. 
My yeares be great, I wyl be gone, 

for spryngtyme nyghts be colde." 



[73] 



OXFORD'S IDEALIST 



He loved the comeliness upon the face 
Of things, their excellence and grace, — 
Old memoried mansions, rippling wheat, 
The eyes of little children wistful-sweet. 
The vesper-songs in Oxford's stately nave ; 

He cherished recollections of still hours 

Of musing in grey old-world shrines 

Or reading his loved poets 'mid the vines 

And honey-hearted flowers 

Of Oxford's slumbrous gardens; and he gave 

Deep utterance to these in perfect speech 
Such as the Greeks alone might reach, — 
Moving with music, golden-sweet of tone, 
Glowing like some rich stone, — 
A speech that may not be 
Surpassed in charm or high felicity. 

^^ — I'ULY XL Walter Pater discoursing on Raphael 
ffM* in Oxford on a summer evening, — I can never 
forget his dreamy, absorbed manner, his measured 
half-chanting of his sentences, — sentences with such a 
flavor! — as thus: ''Yet Plato, as you know, supposed a 
kind of visible loveliness about ideas. Well! in Raphael, 
painted ideas, painted and visible philosophy, are for once 
as beautiful as Plato thought they must be, if one truly 
apprehended them." 

[74] 



Oxford' s Idealist 



From that day to this I have dwelt under the spell of 
a master of no ordinary power and charm, a master who 
through all his pages, — whether he revive with fresh glory 
the pure, calm faith of the old Greeks, or the strange, 
rich life of the middle ages; whether he report his vivid 
impressions of an ancient Norman church or of a centu- 
ried and fragrant London garden, or of a band of athletic 
youth beside the Thames at Oxford, — through all his 
beautiful discourse, cherishes and preaches the passion for 
perfection. 

As I look over his well-beloved books to-day, here in 
the tranquil shade of the oaks, beside the low-murmuring 
Brandywine, — I realize afresh that Walter Pater was 
one who drew disciples about him, and made them for all 
time the lovers and champions of goodness and of beauty, 
by force of a "sweet attractive kind of grace" that distin- 
guished the man and his words. Like many of the most 
successful of teachers, Walter Pater made little direct 
appeal to noble living; rather, he preferred to uphold a 
comely idealism by his devoted interpretation of the best 
in art and letters and human conduct. He was beloved 
by the finer strain of Oxford students; to their youthful 
enthusiasms he offered a distinct fascination in all that he 
spoke or wrote. Amid the controversies of noisier studies 
Pater followed a peaceful path apart, and drew around 
him the elect souls of each new generation of students. A 
sort of latter-day Plato, he seemed, truly; and like that 
first of idealists and prophets of beauty, he left behind 
him a circle of followers who cherish his memory as some- 
thing fragrant and consecrated. At a university where 
polemics and theology and politics clamored for the stu- 

[75] 



Brandywine Days 



dents' attention, it was no small thing, wrote an editor 
at Pater's death, in 1894, "to have a scholar who stead- 
fastly taught the beauty and excellence of literature 
adorned by art, and of art enlightened by literature for 
their own sakes alone." 

Surely, of all places in the world, ancient Oxford 
seems the high home of Idealism; and in the last two 
generations Walter Pater has been Oxford's Idealist 
par excellence. It was of Oxford that one of Pater's 
student-friends sang: 

"There Shelley dreamed his white Platonic dreams; 
There classic Landor throve on Roman thought; 
There Addison pursued his quiet themes; 

There smiled Erasmus, and there Colet taught. 

"That is the Oxford, strong to charm us yet; 
Eternal in her beauty and her past. 
What though her soul be vexed? She can forget 
Cares of an hour; only the great things last. 

"Only the gracious air, only the charm, 
And ancient might of true humanities ; 
These, nor assault of man, nor time, can harm; 
Not these, nor Oxford with her memories. 

"Think of her so ! the wonderful, the fair, 
The immemorial, and the ever young: 
The city sweet with our forefathers' care ; 
The city where the Muses all have sung." 

How did Walter Pater inculcate his idealism? Chiefly 
through biography — through biography, spiritualized and 
glorified for his beautiful purpose, it may be, but always 
portraying some real or imagined youth ardently seeking 
for perfection. Thus it is for youth that Pater holds his 

[76] 



Oxford' s Idealist 



special charm, and for the youthful in every heart. A 
peculiarly lovable author he becomes to those who learn 
to know him aright, to be cherished as Sidney and Shelley 
and Keats are cherished, as Wordsworth and Emerson 
are cherished, for sake of the messages conveyed by these 
noble spirits in language of incomparable power and 
beauty. 

"Interpreter of beauty, he revealed 
Some subtler shade of unimagined grace 
In all the lo<veliness that earth can yield, 
Of far blue hills, or Mona Lisa's face; 
In Marius, in Gaston's poignant fame, 
He has portrayed the spirit's 'gem-like flame'." 



[77] 



BION AND MOSCHUS 



"Would that my father had taught me the craft of a 

keeper of sheep. 
For so in the shade of the elm-tree, or under the rocks 

on the steep, 
Piping on reeds I had sat, and had lulled my sorrow to 

sleep r 

^ ^ULY XII. Oriental and opulent of languorous 
\^m' beauty is the first idyl of Bion, lamenting the death 
of Adonis. Lovers of our great English threnodies 
find here foreshadowings of the elegiac art of Spenser and 
Milton and Shelley. 

All nature is sorrowful, — the mountains and the oaks, 
the rivers and the fountains, the lovely flowers; yea, the 
Graces and Oreads grieve with Aphrodite for her perished 
darling. Truly an immortal elegy, whose wistful and 
pensive harmonies reach us across the ages ! 

Among versions of Bion and Moschus, that of Lloyd 
Mifflin, — a poet's own re-making, rather than too close a 
transcript, — commends itself; it is the work of one who 
in his own original verse has shown himself unmistakably 
of the pastoral brotherhood. In ten sonnets Mr. Mifflin 
modernizes The Lament for Adonis: 

"Gone is that golden voice of mellowest tone, 
Perished the love-light of his glowing eyes, 
And I am left all desolate and alone!" 

Thus laments the inconsolable Cypris. 

[78] 



Bion and Moschus 



"Through the lone woodlands is her anguish borne." 

In the very spirit of Sicilian pastoral song is this 
passage from Sonnet IV: 

''Woe, ivoe for Cypris! all the mountains say; 
While all the oaks, from every ancient limb, 
Make solemn answer. Woe, ah, 'woe for him! 

And mourning fills the groves, and glooms the day. 

The murmurous rivers purling in the vale 
Moan for lorn Aphrodite as they go." 

Many a happy line and descriptive phrase adorns these 
sonnets, as this of Adonis: 

"Following thy hounds at earliest flush of dawn 
While in the fern yet sleeps the dappled fawn." 

In Mr. Mifflin's sonnet-versions from Moschus there 
abound the same sure felicity and fine poetic touch; here 
is his beautiful fourth sonnet from Europa and the Bull: 

"Then timid she arose and went to seek 
The maidens of her train, — the lily girls 
Whose loosely-filleted and wandering curls 
Clustered around each glowing, rosy cheek; 

Daughters that noble sires plain bespeak, 

With voices sweeter than the morning merles, — 
Fresh buds of rarest maidenhood, the pearls 
Of purple Lyre, — sea-crowned queen antique. 

In all Europa's sports they would engage, 

And their most beauteous bodies oft would they 
Bathe where the silver rivers meet the sea, 

Or in the dance float on in bright array; 

Then on some flower-marauding pilgrimage 
Together pluck the lilies of the lea." 

[79] 



Brandy wine Days 



Here, again, one would fain linger to write down cer- 
tain lines and half-lines from these sonnets, as — 

. . . "they heard the tunes 
Sung by the surge across the sleeping mere." 

This, of the Bull, might well have come from Spenser's 
quill: 

"He came into the meadow in his pride 
Among the beauteous daughters gathered there; 
And they had yearnings deep to touch his hair 
And lay their white hands on his silken hide." 

What a sense of lorn and remote and helpless grief in 
this! — 

"But when no longer landmarks could be seen, — 
Far from surf-beaten headlands of her home, 
Or lofty cliff well-loved, along the shore, — 
When all was moving mounds and wastes of green 
With dark illimitable fields of foam, 
Her voice brake forth." 

The dirge for Bion has been made into twelve sonnets 
by Lloyd Mifflin. I must refrain from further quotation, 
— only expressing the hope that, as this poet has proven 
himself so thoroughly at one with the Sicilian pastor- 
alists, he may some day turn the idyls of Theocritus into 
melodious sonnets for our delight. 



[80] 



ONE OF THE ELIZABETHANS 

JULY XIII 

V I'N old author of delightful quality whose volume 
% I has a place of honor in my summer library by the 
Brandywine, is Robert Greene. 

Among the fellows of Shakespeare, this author en- 
dears himself to me for his innocent fancy and wit, his 
praise of lowly contentment, and his portrayal of English 
country scenes. He gives us, too, those intimate autobio- 
graphic touches which are so rare with the shadowy Eliza- 
bethans. Thus he tells of his college career, — he attended 
St. John's, Cambridge, later the Alma Mater in turn of 
Jonson and Herrick and Wordsworth, — and of his early 
London days, with engaging frankness. 

"Being at the University," he writes, **I light among 
wags . . . with whom I consumed the flower of my 
youth. After I had by degrees proceeded Master of Arts, 
I left the university and away to London, where I be- 
came an author of plays and a penner of love pamphlets, 
so that I soon grew famous in that quality, that who for 
that trade grown so ordinary about London as Robin 
Greene?" 

Italian love tales were in vogue, and the English wits 
copied their mannerisms and their intricate plots. Fickle 
swains, rich old men, faithful nurses, sighing damsels, are 
found in all these stories. The conversations are artificial, 
adorned w^ith alliteration, and enriched with allusions to 
Jove, Ulysses, Jason, ^neas, Ceres, and all the ancient 
hierarchy. 

[81] 



Brandy wine Days 



Mamillia. A Mirrour or looking glasse for the Ladies 
of Englande (1583) seems to have been Greene's earliest 
venture. The background Is Italian, the common scene 
for many of the romances and dramas of the period, and 
familiar to us in Orsino's palace and Olivia's garden, or 
in the w^ondrous moonlight musings of Lorenzo and Jes- 
sica, or the woeful tragedy of Verona's deathless lovers. 

The Myrrour of Modestie (1584), Morando (1584), 
Gwydonius, The Garde of Fancie (1584), Planetomachia 
(1585), — these romances our author poured forth w^ith 
ready pen. Not until Marlow^e's Tainburlaine startled 
the literary world with its "high astounding terms," in 
1586 or '87, is Greene known to have turned to the writ- 
ing of plays and to have mingled dramatic with narrative 
authorship. 

An example of Greene's mastery of the prevailing 
euphuism of his day may be found In this epistle (letters 
and soliloquies being Interspersed frequently in all such 
works), wherein a lady rejects an offer of marriage, — 

''Malster Gwydonius, your letter being more hastelle 
received than heartilie read, I perceive by the contents that 
you are stil perplexed with your pen-sick passions, and that 
your disease Is incurable, for if your paines may be appeased 
or your maladie mittigated by no medicine but by my 
meanes, you are like either to pay your due unto death or 
stil to linger In distresse. My cunning is to smal to en- 
terprise the composition of anie secrete simples, anH my 
calling to great to become a Phisitlon to such a paltering 
patient." This curious letter exhibits not only typical 
alliteration, but cunningly inwrought parallelism and dou- 
ble antithesis. We know how tellingly such stilted court- 

[82] 



One of the Elizabethans 



speech was satirized by Shakespeare in the mincing dainti- 
ness of Osric, who, to use his own words to Laertes, was 
in truth, "an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent 
differences, of very soft society, and great showing." 

In spite of much that is amusingly artificial in these 
little stories of Greene's, there is yet in them all, — and in 
his plays as well, — an underlying ethical quality, a sympa- 
thy with what is pure and noble, that redeems them in 
full. Thus Perimedes the Blacke-Sjnith (1588) repre- 
sents a poor smith and his wife as telling stories which in 
"homely dialogue, romance, and song teach patience in ad- 
versity, the just restraints of life, true love, and peace in 
settled low content." In his dedication Greene describes 
the piece as "the tattle between a smith and his wife, full 
of diverse precepts interlaced with delightful histories." 

"Fair Is my love for April In her face," a song In Peri- 
medes, strikes that note of delightful naturalism which 
blossomed Into such wealth of beauty In the hands of 
Greene and his compeers. 

"So as she shows, she seems the budding rose, 
Yet sweeter far than is an earthly flower," — 

"Ah, when she sings, all music else be still, 
For none must be compared to her note; 
Ne'er breathed such glee from Philomela's bill, 

Nor from the morning-singer's swelling throat" : — 

In the freshness and buoyancy of such lines one finds 
the charm that appealed to Lx)well, who said of certain of 
Greene's verses that they have "all the Innocence of the 
Old Age In them." 

Into his title-pages Greene put a deal of quaint fancy. 



[83] 



Brandy wine Days 



A group of moral tales dealing with the Seven Deadly Sins 
(1591) he entitled 

Greenes Farewell to Folly, sent to Courtiers and 
Scholars, as a president to warn them from the vain de- 
lights that draws youths on to repentance. 

Although our poet dismissed his Farewell as "the last 
I meane ever to publish of such superficiall labours," yet he 
set into the piece a song w^hich he never surpassed for ri^ht 
sentiment and simple charm ; — a noble lady, who has taken 
service as a country maid, sings thus of "Content," 

"Sweete are the thoughts that savour of content. 

The quiet mind is richer than a crowne; 
Sweete are the nights in careless slumber spent, 

The poor estate scornes fortune's angry frowne; 
Such sweet content, such mindes, such sleep, such bliss, 
Beggars enjoy, when Princes oft doe miss. 

"The homelie house that harbours quiet reste, 
The cottage that affordes no pride nor care, 

The meane that grees with countrie musick beste. 
The sweete consort of mirthe and modest fare, 

Obscured life sets down a type of blisse; 

A minde content both crown and kingdom is." 

There is surely a very engaging quality in Robert 
Greene; he is one of the most attractive of the minor Eliz- 
abethans. In his sincerity and his childlike grace I think 
ot him as a brother of Chaucer or Herrick. And I like, 
too, that touch of pious humor, almost Puritan, which led 
him to give us such ample and very fetching title-pages 
as this sermon-in-little which forms the title of one of his 
prose pamphlets: 

[84] 



One of the Elizabeihans 



Greenes Never Too Late; or, A Powder of Expe- 
riences, sent to all youthfull Gentlemen, to root out the 
infectious follies, that over-reaching conceits, foster in the 
springtime of their youth, decyphering in a true English 
historic, those particular vanities, that with their frostie 
vapours nip the blossoms of everie ripe braine, from at- 
teining to his intended perfection, as pleasant, as profitable 
being a right pumicestone, apt to race out idleness with 
delight, and follie with admonition. 



[85] 



HOME SCENES 



JULY XIV 

(ToW. H. R.) 

X THOUGHT of thee, old friend, and knew thee 
wise, 
True lover of our Chester County skies. 

Why should I read the golden page of Keats 
When all our fields are rich with balmy sweets. 
When all our woodland ways are fair with flowers 
And birds that sing away the summer hours? 
Why over Walton's "Angler' should I dream 
When here beside our soft and silver stream 
The meadows are as green, the heavens as blue 
As ever Walton's old-world rivers knew? 
Why ponder Shelley with such fine despair 
When Newlin sunsets are as rosy-fair 
And our great hill as lovely landscapes yields 
As Shelley knew in well-loved English fields? 

''Sweet ThejnjJies! runne softly, till I end my Song/' — 

Ah me, the centuries have rolled along 

Since Spenser sang his marriage-song divine; 

Yet here beside the dreamy Brandywine 

In this green oaken glade, his lovely lay 

Sounds its immortal melody to-day. 

By these green softly-sloping Newlin hills 

Are blooms as sweet as Herrick's daffodils, 

As fragrant here the roses in the rain 

[86] 



Home Sce?tes 



As Herrick loved in any Devon lane ; 
And I w^ho worship Wordsworth over all 
And to his wondrous verse am willing thrall, 
Were not more happy in Westmoreland woods 
Than in these long-loved oaken solitudes, 
In Cumbrian pastures find not deeper charm 
Than in the tranquil fields of this old farm. 

Last night I mused o'er many a golden lyric 

Of Wordsworth and of Keats and quaint old Herrick ; 

Their old-world music carried me in dream 

To many an English mead and English stream; — 

But when this morn I watched the soft sun shine 

On green pools of the sleepy Brandy wine, 

I thought of thee, old friend, and knew thee wise, 

True lover of our Chester County skies. 

— Wander afar we may, but in the end 

'Tis Chester County holds our hearts, old friend ! 



[87] 



THE CHARM OF FLOWER-NAMES 

^^ — I'ULY XV. One may often behold at his own doors 
\^^ the beauty that he seeks in vain abroad. So with 
us and the wild plants of our own Brandywine 
meadow. Until a botanical friend of ours, — who tem- 
pered his devotion to Virgil and Catullus and Cicero with 
an ever-increasing friendship with our Pennsylvania flora^ 
— discovered for us the riches that lay so close, we little 
knew the possibilities of these acres w^here the cattle feed 
all summer. The buttercups and daisies, ironweed and 
wild carrot, that blow here in their seasons, we knew well ; 
but when we learned that more than one hundred and 
fifty plants had their home in this grassy plain, it seemed 
a revelation. To copy the names of flowers has ever been 
a delight to me; but like Horace ^Valpole I love old-fash- 
ioned flowers too well to call them hard names, — so I give 
the fragrant garland here in my Hour-Glass according to 
the sweet and familiar titles that were dear to our grand- 
mothers. 

Some of the plants, then, found by our friend and 
follower of Dr. Darlington, were these, — wild clematis, 
meadow-rue, marsh-cress, blue violet, Bouncing Bet, purs- 
lane, St. John's-wort, wood sorrel, jewel-weed, sumac, 
rabbit-foot clover, cinquefoil, swamp rose, wild rose, haw- 
thorn, service-berry, willow-herb, evening primrose, silky 
cornel. May apple, golden-rod, ragweed, cocklebur, Span- 
ish needles, yarrow, daisy, thistle, dandelion, Indian to- 
bacco, ground cherry, mullein, butter-and-eggs, vervain, 
wood-sage, peppermint, corn-mint, basil, pennyroyal, sage, 



"The Charm of Flower-Names 

ground ivy, heal-all, motherwort, sheep sorrel, spurge, 
three-seeded Mercury, clear-weed, hornbeam, ladies' 
tresses, dog-flower, arrowhead, winter fern. 

Truly a goodly and a redolent list ! — and many of the 
names suggestive of the ancient brews and cordials which 
our great-grandmothers concocted from their field plants 
for the betterment of the family health. 

"The search for these dear inhabitants of field and 
forest," writes our friend, "lends to life a new interest, 
which it is a pity so many should miss." These words T 
take as a gentle reproof of my own sorry ignorance of 
scientific botany. Wild flowers and garden flowers I love 
for their own beautiful and fragrant sakes, and for the 
literary and ancestral associations linked inseparably with 
so many of them, brought as they often were from the 
old English gardens ; but as for the titles which the learned 
have given them, — there I am sadly lacking, and must go 
on speaking of rosemary and rue, lavender, marigolds and 
daffodils, — like Perdita, — to the end of my days. 

How fascinating to ponder the charm that simple 
names hold for us! 



— "Endymion, 
The very music of the name has gone 
Into my being!" 

Thus mused Keats when entering with delight upon 
his writing of the loveliest of latter-day epics. Some isle 
of Greece, some English pastoral river, some half-remem- 
bered girl's name in an old song, — these have their unique 
enchantment; our thinking is imperceptibly moulded by 

[89] 



Bi^andywine Days 



just that accident, and Lemnos or Wye or Dianeme speak 
to our mood as no other words could possibly speak. Across 
these wind-swept hills of green Newlin the fancy journeys 
to the sister-townships, near and far — Fallowfield, Marl- 
borough, Uwchlan, Londonderry, Warwick, little Thorn- 
bury, and old Kennett's blissful meadows. Their beauti- 
ful Old-World names are indeed typical of the life of 
their inhabitants, who still happily retain many of the 
traits and conservative thought of those far-off forefathers 
who came over sea from the English and Welsh and Irish 
counties, and here named their rich farms and their vil- 
lages and territorial divisions with the beloved home- 
names, — the same instinct that caused them to cherish 
the marigolds and roses and hollyhocks and other sweet 
old familiar friends of the ancient gardens of their grand- 
mothers, and often to give to the New- World trees and 
birds and wild flowers names endeared through long asso- 
ciation. I confess to a thrill at the very thought of 
all this ; — it has a strange fascination ! 

In the drowsy old gardens of our Pennsylvania home- 
steads there is peace ineffable. Here broods the Silence 
praised of Maeterlinck, — and has brooded since long be- 
fore that young dreamer's day. In an ancient Garden, if 
anywhere, the enchantment of names is strong! 

The flowers of that old, old Garden of my childhood, 
— they haunt me with faded and ghostly beauty. 

O there were scores of sweet old-fashioned blooms 

Dear for the very fragrance of their names, — 
Poppies and gillyflowers and four-o'clocks, 
Cowslips and candytuft and heliotrope and hollyhocks, 
[90] 



a- 




T'he Charm of Flower -Names 

Harebells and peonies and dragon-head, 

Petunias, scarlet sage and bergamot. 
Verbenas, ragged-robins, soft gold-thread, 

The bright primrose and pale forget-me-not, 
Wall-flowers and crocuses and columbines, 
Narcissus, asters, hyacinths, and honeysuckle vines. 

Foxgloves and marigolds and mignonette. 
Dahlias and lavender and damask rose, — 

Your fragrances and colors haunt me yet, 

In memoried summers still your radiance glows; 

My childhood held no happier hours for me 

Than those amid your loveliness, O Flowers of Mem- 
ory! 



[91] 



MIDSUMMER 



^'To a tranquil one 
Who leans through open ivindows of the leaves, 
There'sj either way, the gold of wheaten sheaves." 

^ — ^ULY XVI. The opulent landscape of midsummer 
ffl* is indeed compelling in its tranquil beauty. The 
gleaming Brandywine idles among the low mead- 
ows, its course marked by the silver-green of many 
water-willows. The deep blue-green of the corn just put- 
ting forth soft tassellings, the luscious emerald or gold- 
green of the ripening acres of millet, the wheat fields yel- 
low with stubble and brown with heaped-up sheaves, the 
stately shell-bark trees standing out in far pastures, and 
the great stretches of silent, dreaming woods paling to 
blue on the distant horizon, — all this forms an idyllic pic- 
ture of surpassing charm. Up on the opposite hillside one 
white cottage stands out from the dense green, giving that 
single suggestion of human interest which so satisfies the 
eye as it meditates a pastoral landscape. Meadow-larks 
raise their sorrowful keen cries among the stubble, bob- 
whites whistle clearly, and the brooding voice of the ring- 
dove comes at intervals from the wood-edge. 

The trusty horses move from pile to pile of sheaves 
around the sides of the field. When the load is complete, 
the wain comes rumbling down the hill with a screeching 
of locked wheels, and enveloped in a fog of gray dust rolls 
swiftly up the barn bridge, where the rich burden is tossed 
off into the wide mows. Across the hills other men are 

[92] 



Midsummer 



performing the same harvest operations in other fields; 
and in this fair and fertile valley is enacted one of the 
epics of labor, — man gleaming from the bosom of Mother 
Earth bounteous sustenance for the w^inter to come, — the 
ancient, homely, eternal theme of the poets, from Virgil, 
singing so affectionately of 

''Wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse 
and herd," 

to our English Spenser and Herrick and their followers. 



[93] 



DREAM SHIPS 



G' 



JULY XVII 

'HE great white ships go sailing 

Above the Brandywine, 
O'er leagues of azure trailing 
Their fleet in fleecy line, 
Then disappear forever 
Above our little river 
In silver mist and amethyst 
High o'er the Brandywine. 

I watch them as they wander 
High o'er the Brandywine, 

And see them vanish yonder 
In strange and ghostly line. 
Their masses none may number 
In waking or in slumber. 

So far aloft their passage soft 
Above the Brandywine. 

The great white ships go streaming 
Above the Brandywine, 

Their phantom pennons gleaming 
In pure and snowy line. 
With sure and steady steering 
That knows no wreck nor veering 

At golden noon or 'neath the moon, 
High o'er the Brandywine. 

[94] 



Dream Ship. 



Through realms unknown to mortals 

High o'er the Brandywine, 
Up under Heaven's portals, 

They sail in stately line; 

Through rainbow and through thunder, 

Through airy fields of wonder, 
Their constant way they hold all day 

Above the Brand5rwine. 

Through dawn's enchanted splendor 

Above the Brandywine, 
Through sunsets rich and tender. 

They pass in wondrous line. 

In working and in play-time, 

In harvesting and hay-time, 
Right on they stream, those ships of dream, 

High o'er the Brandywine. 

O mighty cloud-ships sailing 
High o'er the Brandywine, 
In solemn glory trailing 

Your heavenly battle line, — 

Above our little river 

Unresting and forever, 
Your course you hold o'er seas of gold 

Above the Brandywine! 



[95] 



AN ** EXQUISITE SISTER*' 



''Methought 
Her very presence such a szueetness breathed^ 
That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills, 
And every thing she looked on, should have had 
An intimation how she bore herself 
Towards them, and to all creatures. God delights 
In such a being/' 

rULY XVIII. Dorothy Wordsworth, whom her 

4i- brother thus portrayed, was the woman whose 
wonderful influence over him for five and fifty 
long years lent to his poetry certain height and depth and 
brightness otherwise perhaps unrealized ; she was the ''ex- 
quisite sister, ... a woman indeed ! In mind I 
mean, and heart ... In every motion her most in- 
nocent soul outbeams," — of Coleridge's sympathetic de- 
scription. 

To read in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals is to see 
more perfectly into the special charm of the scenery of 
England and Scotland, and to come to fuller apprehension 
of Wordsworth's lyrical and meditative verse. Coleridge 
speaks of ''her eye watchful in minutest observation of Na- 
ture." When she poured out her emotion in the pages of 
her journals, it was in the unmistakable Wordsworthian 
manner of minute and loving appreciation, as in the open- 
ing sentences, written January 20, 1798: "The green 
paths down the hill-sides are channels for streams. The 
young wheat is streaked by silver lines of water running 

[96] 



An "Exquisite Sister' 



between the ridges, the sheep are gathered together on the 
slopes. After the wet dark days, the country seems more 
populous. It peoples itself in the sunbeams. The garden, 
mimic of spring, is gay with flowers." 

Like some rich abundant passage from Theocritus 
seems her enumeration in many an entry in these incom- 
parable Journals. She notes the redbreasts singing in the 
garden, a solitary sheep in a lonely field, young lasses on 
the hills in holiday gear, mothers with their little ones, 
tiny insects spinning in the sunshine, daisies in the grass, 
hazels in blossom, honeysuckles budding, an early straw- 
berry flower under a hedge ; — all this on a late day of win- 
ter. Homely activities of the kitchen-garden are mixed 
with picturesque observations, just as they occur; and the 
phrasing is of the simplest, or colorful, or magic in beauty, 
as fits the case. What are the records in Dorothy's pages 
for the month of June, 1800? — "A sweet mild morning 
Read ballads. Went to church." Next day, Monday, 
instead of wash-tubs, we hear of poetical meditations; 
"I sate a long time to watch the hurrying waves. . . . 
The waves round about the little Island seemed like a 
dance of spirits that rose out of the water." She records 
fine moonlight frequently, and whites: "God be thanked, 
I want not society by a moonlit lake.'' One June even- 
ing Dorothy fetched home lemon-thyme and planted it by 
moonlight. Again we find her sticking peas, watering 
the garden, planting brocoli, sowing kidney-beans and 
spinach, noticing wild roses in the hedges; and, one warm, 
cloudy morning, walking with William in a valley all per- 
fumed with the gale and wild thyme, and through wood- 
lands bright with yellow broom. 

[97] 



Brandywine Days 



No prose can be more delightful reading than these 
passages that shed unconsciously so much light upon the 
wondrous poetry of the man who was blest with an "ex- 
quisite sister." 



[98] 



VIRGIL OF THE ECLOGUES 

JULY XIX 

OEAR VIRGIL, could there be 
More deep felicity 

Than under oaks and elms delighted lying, 
To hear the shepherd swains 
Piping their rustic strains 
In amaboean measures softly dying; — 
To hear the hum of bees 
Below the orchard trees 

And woodland doves in woodland shadows singing; 
To watch the slow^ herds feed 
Across the grassy mead 
Where harvest cheer and harvest hymns are ringing ! 

Dear Virgil, through all years 

Thy tranquil charm endears 

These tranquil woods and fields of my affection; 

Each shepherd song of thine 

Beside the Brandywine 

Touches my heart with kindly recollection. 

O let me never cease 

To love thy pastoral peace, 

Thy tranquil charm and happiness undying; 

Still let me dream of thee 

In deep felicity 

Beneath thy oaks and elms delighted lying! 

Think of Young Milton pensively meditating the 
''thankless Muse" beside some silver brook in the Horton 

[99] 



Brandywine Days 



fields, touching the tender stops of various quills and 
portraying in matchless verse those country labors and 
landscapes, antique pastimes and upland reveries, that 
enchanted his poet's vision, or anon touching w^ith wealth 
of lettered reminiscence the deeper tone of vague melan- 
choly that is inseparable from the cultivated mind musing 
the innocent joys and sorrows of the rural world. If we 
can thus fancy Milton amid 

"Such sights as Youthful Poets dream 
On Summer eves by haunted stream," 

we shall, I believe, come nearer than otherwise we might, 
to seeing in imagination's eye the far-off figure of young 
Virgil wandering under beechen shades beside smooth- 
sliding Mincius, while he sets to stately hexameter music 
his pleasing dreams of shepherd-life in that old, old Italy 
of his that seems to us so remote, so bathed in the hoary 
mists of ancient days. 

Antique rural Italy seems to live again to one who 
will but roam for a few days among the groves and 
farms of the old land. The little stone-built villages, 
whose origins are lost in forgetfulness, — old even in Vir- 
gil's day, — the deep-grassed meadows where simple rustics 
tend the white flocks, the old brown fields tilled and 
reaped for century on century, — these may in some meas- 
ure put the traveller in touch with the Mantua of Vir- 
gil's bucolic songs. At every turn he will thrill to find the 
Eclogues, — their color and setting, — re-pictured. In yon- 
der contented peasant's little grange he may see again the 
rustic happiness of Tityrus, whose fence of sallow-trees 
was fraught with flowers, whose thrifty bees lulled the 

[100] 



Virgil of the Eclogues 



shepherd with soft murmur, while from lofty elms the 
ring-doves moaned and told their gentle grief. 

Peace and golden tranquillity are here, if anywhere, — 

"Low of cattle and song of birds, 
And health and quiet and loving words." 

Here the shepherd's desires are fulfilled, — country fare 
of curds and cream, brimming milk pails, clustering grapes, 
hives that drip with honey, pastures for the flossy heifers 
and the woolly dams with their tender little ones. Yon- 
der youth beneath the ilex might be another Corydon 
chanting to Alexis and telling how the nymphs are bring- 
ing for him their osier crates heaped high with lilies and 
violets and poppies, with narcissus and fragrant fennel, 
twining them with casia and choosing the delicate hyacinth 
and marsh-marigold. Downy-cheeked quinces will Cory- 
don give, and the chestnuts dear to his Amaryllis, and 
waxen plums, — all blending their fragrance and luscious 
bloom. 

Amant alter na Carnenael — it sounds across all the 
centuries; Menalcas and Damoetas engage again in rustic 
rivalry, with friendly Palaemon as umpire. Again Mopsus 
and his fellow-shepherd lament the death of Daphnis and 
exchange gifts, — a pipe and shepherd's crook. Again does 
Corydon triumph in the contest of pastoral minstrelsy. 

Ex illo Corydon Co7-ydon est tempore nobis. Ah, truly, 
amid the hum of bees and drone of locusts, o'er sheep- 
downs sweet with flowery thyme and daffodils, in that 
magical land of poesy and dream, — pass before memory's 
eye, now moist with immemorial reminiscence, Virgil's 
shepherd swains and lovely girls, Tityrus and Meliboeus, 

[101] 



Brandy wine Days 



Corydon and Damon and Menalcas, Amyntas and Lyci- 
das, Galatea, Neaera and Phyllis, Nysa and Amaryllis, 
like young figures from the Golden Age. What enchant- 
ment is theirs, what pathos, what immortal charm! 



[102] 



ADOWN THE BRAND YWINE 

JULY XX 

^Y^HERE flows our dear idyllic Brandywine 
llf Through flowery meadows green and deep and fair, 
O come in summer afternoons divine! 
Lay by thy load of care. 
Who seeks for joy at Mother Nature's heart, 

From haste and hurry must enfranchised be; 
No breath from noisy street or toiling mart 
Her loveliness must stain. 
No memory of pain 
Encloud her great and sweet simplicity. 

A land of peaceful quietude is this. 

Where weary-eyed Ambition comes not near, — 
A home of happiness and rural bliss 

Throughout the tranquil year. 
O come and ramble in these reedy dells, 

These barley-fields and uplands sweet with hay; 
Come hear the lilies ring their fairy bells; 
And by clear-watered rills 
That wimple down the hills, 

And through the tossing millet let us stray. 

Then when the sun is drooping to the west, 
And all the shadows reach out far and long. 

When the wood-pigeon by her lonely nest 
Begins her plaintive song, 

[103] 



Brandywine Days 



We'll launch our boat, and laying by the oars, 
Adown the Brandywine we'll slowly drift, 
By grassy isles, by willow-shaded shores, 
O'er many a glassy deep 
Where silence seems to sleep. 
And down green shallows murmurous and swift. 

Wild-roses frail are blowing by the banks. 

Their faces imaged clearly in the tide. 
Rich tiger-lilies droop in yellow ranks, 

And tiny star-flowers hide 
Their tremulous bells amid tall nodding weeds. 

Sweet buds we'll pluck of tender amber tint 
That grow among the water-shaken reeds, 
Or by the rustling sedge 
Along the oozy edge 

Of meadows odorous with peppermint. 

Soft music shall enchant us as we pass, — 

Light zephyrs playing in the drooping trees, 
Thin chirping voices hidden in the grass, 

And lily-haunting bees. 
We'll hear the jocund robin far and faint 

From where he chirps 'mid orchard-shadows cool, 
Or catch some lonely heron's harsh complaint 
As round a bank of fern 
We sweep with sudden turn 

And find him fishing in a gravelly pool. 

We'll float where swaying cedars scent the air, 
The haunt of squirrels and forest-loving birds; 
[104] 



Adown the Brandy wine 



Then out again by luscious pastures fair 

Grazed by white-breasted herds. 
And here and there beneath low willow trees 

We'll pass old fishermen of sober mien, 
Who watch their drifting corks in blissful ease 
Or look with lazy eyes 
Along the cloudless skies, 
Well pleased with these long summer days serene. 

Thus while the loitering current bears our boat 

Adown the Brandjovine's enchanted stream, 
In happy reverie we'll smoothly float 

And through the twilight dream, — 
Until we see the languid yellow moon 

Above the drowsy hills serenely glide, 
While frogs begin to chant their evening tune, 
And rose and wren and bee 
Are resting silently 

And warm peace floods the sleeping countryside. 



[105] 



AN HOUR WITH HERRICK 



n 



JULY XXI 

ERRICK, thine Hesperides 
Liveth through the centuries, 
And thine ever-dewy page 
Brings delight to youth and age. 
There the rosy girls and boys 
Share the homely country joys, — 
Harvest-homes and revellings, 
Quintels, wakes and wassailings. 
There we see in dreamings rare 
Silvia and Sappho fair, 
Corinna who at break of day 
Went with thee to fetch in May, 
Anthea and Perilla tall, 
And Julia loveliest of all. 
In thy leafy Devon lanes 
Piping quaint bucolic strains. 
Neat-herds all their love express 
To the buxom neat-herdess. 

Thy Book the Arcadian life rehearses 
In sweet and soft idyllic verses, 
Silver odes and songs of gold. 
Echoes of the days of old. 
Nor doth it lack the sober page. 
Devotions of thy vicarage. 
Where thou yieldest many a gem 
To the Babe of Bethlehem. 
[106] 



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An Hour with Herrick 



So we give a crown to thee, 
Prince of Rural Minstrelsy; — 
Nations fail and states decay, 
Kings and senates pass away; 
'Tis alone the golden Rhyme 
Knoweth not the tooth of Time. 
Herrick, thine Hesperides 
Liveth through the centuries! 

I once saw a copy of the first edition of Herrick's 
poems, with their title Hesperides which he must have hit 
upon with fine gusto of delight, — that title which he gave 
to the children of his fancy, born far in the west of Eng- 
land, in the "dull Devonshire" which he affected to de- 
spise. ''Hesperides: or. The Works both Humane and 
Divine of Robert Herrick Esq." That is the quaint head- 
ing of the title-page. And where but "at the Crown and 
Marygold in Saint Pauls Churchyard," should the elect 
few, who had then the wit to discern its charm, purchase 
this golden volume in the stormy year of 1648-9, when it 
appeared ! 

In the old yellow pages and cumbrous spelling of this 
ancient volume, as I pored over it in a snug low corner of 
Bodley's library, the lovely poems of the master had for 
me an added fragrance, easily transporting me into those 
remote days when the ruddy Vicar of Dean-Prior rambled 
in Devon lanes and sang of 

"The country's sweet simplicity, 
The purling springs, groves, birds and well-weaved bowers, 
With fields enameled with flowers;" 

of the "Shepherd's fleecy happiness" and his soft "silken 

[107] 



Brandy wine Days 



slumbers" at night, and of every joy and innocent pastime 
of the countryside. 

Herrick's home was an old-time cosy parsonage, and 
his pets, — his hen, his goose, his lamb, his cat and his dog, 
which he enumerates in his quaint poem, "His Grange, 
or Private Wealth," — solaced his idler hours,^ we may 
suppose; for Herrick's were simple, old-fashioned pleas- 
ures. He was a true brother of Izaak Walton in the 
wholesome cheeriness and serene philosophy with which 
he took the world. 

"Lord, thou hast given me a cell 

Wherein to dwell, 
A little house, whose humble roof 

Is weatherproof, 
Under the spars of which I lie 

Both soft and dry; 
Where thou, my chamber for to ward, 

Hast set a guard 
Of harmless thoughts, to watch and keep 

Me while I sleep. 
Low is my porch as is my fate. 

Both void of state ; 
And yet the threshold of my door 

Is worn by th' poor. 
Who thither come and freely get 

Good words or meat. 
Like as my parlour so my hall 

And kitchen's small ; 
A little buttery, and therein 

A little bin, 
Which keeps my little loaf of bread 

Unchipped, unfled ; 
Some brittle sticks of thorn or briar 

Make me a fire, 



[108] 



A?^ Hour with Herrick 



Close by whose living coal I sit 
And glow like it." 

My brother wrote of this poem, while visiting Her- 
rick's antique village: "I can never forget the impress 
of that lovable and delightful poem of gratitude, in the 
light shed upon it by this small, quaint and simple fire- 
side, and cosy, small dining-room of the dear old poetic 
vicar." And the poem continues, — 

"Lord, I confess too, when I dine, 

The pulse is thine, 
And all those other bits that be 

There placed by thee ; 
The worts, the purslane, and the mess 

Of water-cress, 
Which of thy kindness thou has sent; 

And my content 
Makes those, and my beloved beet 

To be more sweet." 

Can such a poem of thanksgiving be surpassed for 
homely, affectionate piety, and avowal of contentment 
with the lot God has given? Content is Robert Herrick's 
word again and again. 

"Or pea, or bean, or wort or beet. 
Whatever comes, content makes sweet." 

Content, not Cates 
" 'Tis not the food, but the content 
That makes the table's merriment . 
A little pipkin with a bit 
Of mutton, or of veal in it, 
Set on my table, trouble-free. 
More than a feast contenteth me." 

[109] 



Brandy wine Days 



Simple-hearted, sweet-souled Poet, what a lesson is 
thine to us of this over-busy twentieth century! 

Herrick's "Argument of His Book" is a delightful and 
naive bead-roll, — 

"I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers, 
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers; 
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes. 
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes . . . 
I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece, 
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris; 
I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write 
How roses first came red, and lilies white; 
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing 
The court of Mab, and of the fairy King. 
I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall, 
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all." 

Very precise indeed is this charming catalogue of the 
objects which his muse has immortalized, for his pages are 
filled with springtime and summer, with roses and lilies 
and the "dainty daisy." Cherry blossoms and daffodils 
flutter across his lines, and birds and brooks carol from 
every corner. Ruddy swains dance round the May-pole 
in company with maidens that are "ruby-lipt and tooth'd 
with pearl." Here Lallage "with cow-like eyes" sits as 
judge while neat-herds pipe their pastoral ditties in friendly 
rivalry. Herrick's marriage-lays to young brides of his 
acquaintance are jewelled with gracious and delicate com- 
pliment; and his dainty lyrics on the fairies of the forest 
are, in the words of the old anthology where they first 
appeared, "very delightful to the sense, and full of mirth." 
In the immortal pages of the Hesperides, apple-cheeked 
children wander through corn-fields "a-flutter with 

[110] 



An Hour with Herrick 



poppies," and "girls of flower-sweet breath" dip their 
"silvery feet" in "the spangling dew dredg'd o'er the 
grass," and pluck from golden orchards the "fragrant ap- 
ples, blushing plums," the "Kathrine pears, and apricots 
in youthful years." 

The hearty old rector addressed to young brides of his 
acquaintance marriage-lays jewelled with gracious and 
exquisite compliment. He could say the happiest things 
to the lasses of Devonshire, as when he wrote this, — 

"UPON A VIRGIN KISSING A ROSE 

'Twas but a single Rose, 

Till you on it did breathe; 
But since (me thinks) it shows 

Not so much Rose, as Wreathe." 

It is, of course, reminiscent of Jonson's splendid song, 
"Drink to me only with thine eyes." Anything the young- 
er poet might achieve by way of echo from rare Ben's 
verse would be a happiness to him, for was not the veteran 
veritably canonized by his worshipful disciple, — 

"When I a Verse shall make, 
Know I have pray'd thee 
For olde Religion's sake. 
Saint Ben, to aid me. 

"Candles I'll give to thee, 
And a new Altar; 
And thou Saint Ben shalt be 
Writ in my Psalter!" 

For me, Herrick's truest self speaks out in those small 
pieces wherein with innocent joy he sings of his homely 
contentment and his "own beloved privacie." 

[Ill] 



Brandy wine Days 



In the magic verse of this lovable old singer the hill- 
sides of Devonshire become dewy-sweet and fragrant with 
an undying charm. Open the Hesperides where we will, 
and among its 1401 little poems we find such titles as 
these in this garden of delight, — "To Primroses Filled 
with Morning Dew," "How Roses Came Red," "To the 
Nightingale and Robin Redbreast," "To Blossoms," "How 
Marigolds Came Yellow," "Harvest Home," "An Apron 
of Flowers," — and so on through hundreds of such flow- 
ery and idyllic titles that wreathe themselves across the 
rosy pages where the poet doth with his 

"Eclogues intermix 
Some smooth and harmless Bucolics." 

With Herrick, in his honest love for his own lovely 
verse, we must agree that his volume is 

"a plant, sprung up to wither never, 
But like a laurel, to grow green forever." 

I quote again from my brother's impressions of Her- 
rick's home village of Dean Prior: "I looked in upon the 
ancient kitchen and dining room, the very same in which 
good old Robert Herrick feasted on his garden's products 
and sat before his cosy fire and thanked God over and over 
for the joy of rural contentment and true and simple 
pleasures. With the great keys in hand the rector's wife 
led me down the by-road to the small, pretty church, 
whose old, solid, stout and sturdy battlemented tower 
remains as in Herrick's own day. Where Herrick lies 
may never be known, for his reverend dust was moved 
from inside the church, to rest beneath the sunshine and 

[112] 



An Hour with Herrick 



the flowers he so adored, in an unmarked grave. The 
churchyard has a many-centuried yew, up which climbs 
dark ivy. One of the most picturesque Arcadian villages 
that ever I saw is Dean Prior, with thatched roofs, odd 
windows, flowers everywhere in endless profusion. Think 
of it, Herrick's parishioners lived in these very same old 
ancestral homes!" 

I am thinking only of Herrick's pastoral quality, this 
July afternoon among our flowery meadows. Emerson 
reports of Channing the younger, that "he celebrates Her- 
rick as the best of English poets, a true Greek in Eng- 
land." On winter nights by the ingle I often glow over 
Herrick's poems of comfort and honest good cheer that 
have in them so much that is Hellenic and Horatian. 

All that is sweet and tender and lovable in the strange 
old country-life of England of three hundred years ago 
receives abundant celebration in Herrick's faultless and 
exquisitely limpid verse ; and I know of no more delightful 
book to be owned in a country home, — to which members 
of the family may turn when daily duties press heavily 
and farm-labor seems all unpoetic. Let our youth find, 
in the blossomy pages of the Hesperides, how lovely a 
thing the out-door world may be when seen aright, and 
what idyllic joy in that country-life which Herrick has 
portrayed, — *'a country-life," says Austin Dobson, "which 
time has 'softly moulded in the filmy blue' of doubtful- 
est remoteness, and over which his poetry has cast its 
inalienable — its imperishable charm." 



Herrick, thine Hesperides 
Liveth through the centuries! 

[113] 



SILVIA 



"^ J'ULY XXII. In a neighboring shire there is a wide 
fei* valley where the little willow dells in April are 
softly beautiful like those of Corot; where in Sep- 
tember the red apples lie heaped in the bowering orchards, 
and where the far woodlands take on in late autumn a 
veil of dreamy fawn and purple. Beneath great, hos- 
pitable trees in this valley stands an old-fashioned and 
most comfortable farmstead, among its hollyhocks and 
peonies, its marigolds and purple phlox. This is the home 
of our friend Silvia ; we call her Silvia, for she seems like 
her of whom Shakespeare wrote, in those words that have 
an added loveliness when sung to the air whereto Schubert 
has mated them, — 

"Who is Silvia? what is she, 
That all our swains commend her?" 

This day Silvia has been with us, and under our tall 
oaks she has been telling us of her sojourn in Hellas, — 
for she is one of those who still hold to the old faith, 
placing Thought high above Fact, and believing with Shel- 
ley that 

"Greece and her foundations are 
Built below the tides of war, 
Based on the crystalline sea 
Of thought and its eternity;" 

and she has strengthened her faith by long contemplation 
of the homes of Hellenic art and poetry. She has rambled 

[114] 



Silvia 



in the Vale of Tempe, has seen the moon lighting the 
broken marbles of Phidias, and beheld the very fields 
where the shepherds of Theocritus long ago chanted their 
amaboean songs. With Bayard Taylor might Silvia say: 

"Golden the hills of Cos, with pencilled cerulean shadows; 
Phantoms of Carian shores that are painted and fade in the 

distance ; 
Patmos behind, and westward the flushed Ariadnean Naxos, — 
Once as I saw them sleeping, drugged with the poppy of sum- 
mer." 

She spoke of Sunium, bounded in springtime with the 
violet sea and backed with green corn-lands, red poppies, 
and masses of tiny blooms, yellow and purple and white, 
in the open and beneath soft shadowing trees. A morning 
climb upon the slopes of Lycabettus, she said, was like a 
page from a Greek idyll. There the slopes were covered 
with great patches of asphodel, pale pink against the blue 
sky or the gray of Hymettus beyond. Innumerable bees 
were humming among the flowers, and the wind was 
blowing softly through the pine trees over the lower 
slopes. Here and there poppies shone out, and everywhere 
were pink and purple and yellow flowers covering the 
brown and gray of the stony slopes. From the top one 
could see a vast stretch of blue sea, with blue islands and 
blue ranges of mountains beyond them all. In the west 
rose up Cyllene (birthplace of great Hermes, — the "Cyl- 
lene hoar" of Milton's Arcades), clear white with snow 
against the sky of orange and pale rose. 

Into the north of Hellas, Silvia and her friends jour- 
neyed ; and on the slopes of classic Pelion they saw the olive 
groves, gray-green, with scarlet anemones glowing in the 

[115] 



Brandy wine Days 



sweet grass, delicate poplars outlined against the sky, 
and fruit trees gleaming in the sun against the old houses. 

As Silvia went on with her narrative, and the shadows 
grew long across the fields, we seemed rapt ; ancient Hellas 
lived again, and Homer's land was no longer a vanished 
dream! 

In Thessal)^ said Silvia, we could imagine ourselves 
in the land of Achilles, the fertile land of Phthia, Homer 
calls it, near Othrys, which we saw white in the distance 
as we passed Pherae, the home of the hospitable Admetus, 
whose flocks Apollo tended for a year. Did we dream 
that we beheld the divine herdsman himself? Here was 
the region where 

"Day by day more holy grew 
Each spot where he had trod, 
Till after-poets only knew 

Their first-born brother as a god." 

The day at the Vale of Tempe was a superb one, in 
the soft May weather. In this romantic pass, great plane 
trees lean over the water, in many grotesque and rugged 
shapes, veiled in the most delicate golden-green and brown 
leafage, and the earth is starred with anemone and yellow 
blossoms. It all is so exquisitely beautiful that one ex- 
claims with fresh delight at every turn of the road. At 
noon we rested under great plane trees for two hours, be- 
side a spring, — nymph-haunted, of course, — where, we 
could imagine, 

"By dimpled brook and fountain-brim, 
The wood-nymphs, decked with daisies trim, 
Their merry wakes and pastimes keep." 

[116] 



Silv 



ta 



The homeward ride through the sunset, with the 
storks all sailing home, with Larissa and its minarets, and 
up against the sky Ossa and Olympus just touched with 
enchanted color on the horizon, — Olympus, fit home of 
the gods, remote and holy and awe-inspiring, — all this 
ended an experience of old Homeric Hellas that will re- 
main unforgetable. 

And in Arcadia, — Arcadia, remotest of lands, so vague 
and dream-like that the Hellenic imagination fancied it 
the home of an idyllic shepherd folk, whose lives were 
felicitous beyond compare, — in that region of orchards 
and flocks, of wild honey and crocus and hyacinth and 
deep-starred grass, Silvia beheld a shepherd piping with 
all his flock around him, and a stately oak glade below, 
— and all in Arcadia! 

That last touch of Silvia's narrative, how it takes pos- 
session of the fancy! — the crown of her Hellenic expe- 
riences, — transporting one from this noisy century of ours 
to the pure simplicity of the most poetic age of the world. 

Said Silvia: "In a vale of Arcady 

I saw a shepherd lying in the shade — 

Some Cor5^don or Lycidas, methought — 

Soft piping 'mid those flowery solitudes 

Beside his grazing flock. No fairer sight 

Have I beheld in pastoral Sicily, 

By storied Tempe, or Larissa's plains 

Where storks sail homeward through the setting sun, 

Nor by white-templed Sunium on the sea, — 

Than this enchanted scene among the fields 

Of Arcady remote." 

[117] 



Brandy wine Days 



And at her words, — 
Unto my heart, a-fevered with the fret 
Of these our hurried days, a vision came 
Of old-world Hellas bathed in dreamy light 
And sweet with music of the rustic flute, 
Laughter and lyric joy; of green-lipt springs 
Where oreads and wood-gods joined with Pan 
In rural revelry; far mountain slopes 
Down which the troops of pure-browed Artemis 
Ranged in the jocund chase; and beechen groves 
Beneath whose murmurous foliage dryads gleamed 
Soft-white as mists above the twilight meads. 
— ^Thus for an hour the clear and golden light 
Of old-world Hellas shone again when Silvia, 
Poetic Silvia, spoke of Corydon 
A-fluting in a vale of Arcady! 



[118] 



THE SAME OLD WAYS 



"I do not want change: I want the same old and loved 
things, the same wild flowers, the same trees and soft 
ash-green; the turtle-doves, the blackbirds, the coloured 
yellowhammer sing, sing, singing so long as there is light 
to cast a shadow on the dial, for such is the measure of 
his song, — and I want them in the same place" 

^ J'ULY XXV. Let the restless and nervous seeker 
^^B" after pleasure pursue his elusive goal along dusty 
leagues from city to city, from mountain to sea- 
side, — peace and contentment are rarely his. Let me find 
contentment and peace beside the idyllic Brandyv^^ine, 
where the same green and yellow adorn the farm fields 
year after year, where the honeysuckle and lilacs breathe 
the same old fragrance, and the ring-dove pours forth his 
ancient sorrow, where ambition is mild, and fashions 
change but seldom, and the same kindly faces go by on the 
old yellow highway from farm to village, from village to 
farm. 

"I still can hear at times a softer note 
Of the old pastoral music round me float." 

The folk of the Brandywine dales run not after new 
things; they hear, perhaps, of another vessel added to the 
navy or of a new species of mind-cure, but such things dis- 
turb not these good, old-fashioned people. Hay- wagons 
are more to them than war-ships, and they are too hearty 
and robust to need any mind-cures; their wholesome en- 
thusiasm is centered in their cattle and barns, their holly- 

[119] 



Brandy wine Days 



hocks and roses. April finds them plowing the brown soil, 
July sees them gathering in the overflowing harvests, al- 
most as in the days of their forefathers ; and if the ancient 
tune of the whetstone on the cradle-blade has become well- 
nigh a lost melody, yet the steady, rhythmic hum of the 
reaper-and-binder fills the dreamy air agreeably. Men 
grow old and die on the same farms, sons inherit acres 
that have "been in the family" for a century or more, 
and daughters and granddaughters raise the same old be- 
loved phlox and four-o'clocks and mangolds. Just across 
the hills are living the descendants of an Oxfordshire 
worthy who came oversea in Queen Anne's day and took 
up an ample tract near the Brandywine; and the Irish 
Quaker squire who settled this green township two cen- 
turies ago is lineally represented to-day by a group of 
lively little folks who live all summer long beside his an- 
cient little river. 

"Here old uses still obtain, 

Sickle and scythe the reapers ply. 
Still tasselled team and tilted wain 
Rejoice the eye ; 

"As though Tinne, yielding to its charnn. 
Over this quaint sequestered land 

Of slumbrous field and dreamy farm 
Had stayed his hand." 

So the old days and the old ways have their natural 
home in these tranquil valleys; quietude and conserva- 
tism are seated here by ancient right; grazing cattle and 
blossoming orchards and antique gardens of golden and 
purple bloom, present the same peaceful aspect as men 

[120] 



The Same Old Ways 



looked upon in this region in old pre-Revolution years, 
this antique Brandywine region of 

"Quiet meadows, with their browsing kine. 
The watery vale and swarded hills, o'erswept 
From morn till eve by shadows of white clouds, 
Whisper of lime and poplar, or the lisp 
Of rivulet, beneath the willow boughs 
Telling her pebbles ; melodies of joy, 
Calm as far bells of blessedness." 

Shall I not find a deeper charm, for all this ancient 
background, as I re-read old favorite books, the Arcadia, 
Izaak Walton, Herrick and Wordsworth? 

"Antiquity, thou wondrous charm!" 



[121] 



THE BROOK 



JULY XXX 

"Oftentimes I used to look 
Upon its banks, and long 
To steal the beauty of the brook 
And put it in a song." 

©ELOW the ancient grassy hill it flows 
Among the pastures by the shadowy wood, 
And melts at last into the Brandywine. 
Small willows bend above it, fragrant weeds 
Draw from it sweetness for their golden blooms 
And purple blossoms, cattle stoop to drink 
And dream and ruminate beside its sands 
And mossy stones ; and from the shadowy wood 
Come shy wood-creatures, — birds and merry squirrels 
And swift ground-hackies, — sip and disappear; 
So manifold the life its waters feed. 

'Tis here I love to walk at twilight hour 
Beneath the old forsaken orchard trees, 
And near the ancient, quaint "Star-gazers' Stone," 
When o'er the shoulder of the grassy hill 
The sickle moon swings low; — the cows have gone, 
Shut in the upland pasture for the night; 
The gold and purple blossoms of the weeds 
Hang drowsily; the birds and merry squirrels 
Sleep safely in their woodland bowers; and all 
The little valley slumbers, save the brook. 
[122] 



^ 
>- 




The Brook 



More sweet its melody by night than day, 
So silent is all else ; with silvery purl 
And soft adagios it bubbles down 
O'er elfin slopes and faery waterfalls; 
It murmurs soft in mossy cool retreats, 
Caresses many a bed of cress, and flows 
Between white stones in tiny sluices swift. 

The twilight deepens into dusk; on high 
The argent crescent swims above the hill 
Like some white faery island set adrift; 
Soft night-winds sweep the ancient grassy hill 
And stir keen weedy fragrance, while the brook 
Sings on with ceaseless music. 

Then, I think. 
Nature most truly speaks; 'tis then she yields 
Unto her devotees her utmost spell. 
The endless twilight of the mid-day woods 
Or evening in the dim and moonlit fields 
Are magic hours ! And thee, dear Stream, I thank 
For many golden reveries and dreams 
Beside thy weedy margin while the moon 
Above the old forsaken orchard trees 
Shone softly on thy faery waterfalls. 



[123] 



NEW POETS 



"I saw the singers of my day, 
A happy band, a folk of holiday" 

^ — I'ULY XXXI. It is a significant thing to read 
ffi- through a new volume of verse, and find it portray- 
ing a fine personality and a fresh range of moods 
and sentiments. Turning the pages of such a book, this 
summer evening, on a hill above the Brandyvvine, I found 
food for pondering and pleasant speculation. A chance 
meeting with the author, Harry Koopman, a happy hour 
on the serene campus of the old college where he is libra- 
rian, and then the dreaming hours over his verses, — these 
have brought me acquainted with a personality of original- 
ity and persuasive charm. 

Mr. Koopman responds quickly and sensitively to all 
beauty, whether in book, in music, in landscape, or in 
human faces. He can speak sententiously, as where he 
portrays the Violin as — 

"Ariel yearning at Miranda's side 
For the humanity to him denied." 

or in defining poetry, — 

"To make men think what they but felt before, — 
The poet's art is this, yet how much more !" 

His tenderness of heart and fine power of affection 
are in evidence in various elegies, literary tributes, and 
avowals of love. His little poem, 'Towell's Letters," 
illustrates his delicacy of wistful sympathy: 

[124] 



New Poets 



"Heart of love ! I close thy book, — 
Whereon thyself didst never look, — 
And say: The world, which deemed it knew 
Lowell witty, wise, and true. 
Guessed but half ; who readeth here 
As a lover holds him dear." 

For brooding imagination that transfigures all things 
seen, for classical scholarship and artistic touch, in musing 
reverie, this poet is strong; love of the old and sympathy 
with whatever Is best In the modern world, fit him for 
vivid utterance; and he writes with vigor and melody. 
His long monody on "The Gothic Minster" represents 
his powers at their ripest. He tells of the deep delight 
awaiting the pilgrim from the new world who first looks 
upon a cathedral in Europe : 

"For him who from our naked shore brings eyes 
Of unblest innocence, which never saw 
Beauty in stone nor vaulted awfulness. 
Yet brings a heart that thrills to grace and gloom — 
What ravishment awaits! On him unwarned. 
In all their beauty and their fragrance, burst 
These fadeless blossoms of the centuries. 
Upon his ears not dulled by frequency 
The mighty chords of these vast instruments 
Shatter full diapason." 

With a sympathy that easily spans the centuries, our 
poet muses upon the artisans who wrought the cathedral's 
grace and solemn beauty. 'TIs a fine piece of imagination, 
touched with the charm of children and flowers; — such 
living scenes rise to his vision as he contemplates the 
ancient shrine, — 

[125] 



Brandy wine Days 



"Then the mind's eye 
Pictures the workman of that elder time 
On Sunday with his children wandering 
In wood and field, and noting curve and poise 
Of flower and leaf and stem, while constantly 
His children bring him brighter, sweeter blooms 
For his approval. Wearying at last, 
They lighten with their songs the homeward way. 
No man might hope to see the pile complete, 
But yet his daily, weekly, yearly task 
He wrought and finished, and in doing it 

Found happiness he knew 

The artist's joy, finding in art his life." 

In a certain class-room, and in chapel, at Yale, two 
youthful poets were wont to sit side by side. Now that 
one of them has forever closed his eyes upon the world of 
beauty which he loved, and which he sang in memorable 
strains, his friend, — our author, — has written this affec- 
tionate poem in memory of those days at Yale: — 

"Edward Rowland Sill 
"Of me shall this be told 
Long hence and far away to envying ears, 

When o'er my age the years 
Their billows of oblivion have rolled: 

"That all my college days 
I sat in class and chapel side by side 

With Sill, even then our pride. 
As now the land's — when he is past men's praise. 

"Oft when the preacher read 
Some lesson drawn from wandering Israel's woes, 

Would Sill his brown eyes close. 
And on my shoulder lay his beautiful head. 

[126] 



New Poets 



"Still, as the voice droned on 
The dreamer's fancy flitted unopposed; 

And when the sermon closed, 
Those starry eyes brighter from Dreamland shone." 



The emotions that are stirred by the sights and sounds 
and thoughts and melodies around one in Italy have not 
always summoned forth images of the home-land beyond 
the western seas; but in the case of Grace Ellery Chan- 
ning, brooding in a Medicean garden, "with the sight of 
sunset and sea, the taste of mountain air and woodland 
freshness, the faces and forms of Florentine saints and 
antique gods, the serene poignancy of great phrases of 
music," — there has flowed from her pen a moving poem 
on our American meadow-lark, suggested to her upon 
hearing a nightingale's song: 

"Garden and grove grow dim; they change and fade 
Like their pale lords, the vanished Medici; 
They are the phantomed shadows of a shade, 
It is not night, nor earth, nor Italy; 
And that which sings within the silences, — 
I know him well, — no singer of the dark. 
No alien bird, no foreign minstrel he. 
But mine onvn unsung ivesiern-carolling lark, 
Triumphant singer of the farthest day. 
Carolling earth, heaven, and Italy away. 

"I've heard him in the New World wilderness 
Singing, sad nightingale, not notes like thine. 
But plenteously poured forth like joyous wine 
From an overflowing chalice. Loneliness 
And sorrow were not then ; the sunny plain 
Filled and ran o'er with the melodious rain 
Of music, and the golden-spiced air 

[127] 



Brandywine Days 



Trembled with happiness fine-feh and rare; 
While over, over, over, high above 
Went lilting still the med-lark, love and love, 
And joy and passionate joy and ecstasy. 

singer and O song, return to me! 

O nightingale ! — 
Thou art but love in sorrow, — I have heard 
Love's self sing westward from a golden-throated bird!" 

After this poem, our sweetly-poignant meadow-lark 
may no longer be called "unsung." 

* * * 

A poet for the summer mood is William Stanley 
Braithwaite, he of the distinguished name and rich imagin- 
ation. Of the line of such poets as Spenser and Keats 
and Rossetti, of warm sympathies and picturesque diction, 
Mr. Braithwaite writes for those who care for the old 
poetic traditions. Memory's voice can always wake him to 
some tender sentiment; thus he muses over a pressed 
flower in a copy of Keats' Endyjnion: 

"As Keats' old honeyed volume of romance 

1 oped to-day to drink its Latmos air, 

I found all pressed a white flower lying where 
The shepherd lad watched Pan's herd slow advance. 
Ah, then what tender memories did chance 
To bring again the day, when from your hair. 
This frail carnation, delicate and fair. 

You gave me 

What waves of passion seem 
About this flower to linger and to break. 
Lit by the glamor of the moon's pale beam. 
The while my heart weeps for this dear flower's sake." 

It is cheering to observe a poet who holds to one fine 
[128] 



New Poets 



tradition, who in a day of new fashions and strange ex^ 
periments in verse still cherishes the ideals ot his youth 
and sings in the old melodious way. An avowed disciple 
of the romantic school is William Stanley Braithwaite, 
whose earlier volume proved him of the ''little clan" who 
inherit something of the spell of Keats; a poet whose 
lyrics have won the regard of the late Mr. Stedman, and 
of Miss Guiney and other right judges of poetry. 

In the opening sonnets of his new volume, he writes 
of the ''House of Falling Leaves" as a place of dream and 
of enchantment, in lines marked by subtle music and grave 
pathos, as in the closing stave, — 

"When Time shall close the door unto the house 
And open that of Winter's soon to be, 
And dreams go moving through the ruined boughs — 
He who went in comes out a Memory. 
From his deep sleep no sound may e'er arouse, — 
The moaning rain, nor wind-embattled sea." 

As a lyric artist this singer is notable for the abund- 
ance of his forms; he writes sonnets in thoughtful mood, 
giving them true dignity and a certain literary flavor, and 
choosing this or a pensive meditative stanza for tributes 
to his poetic masters — Blake, Keats, Rossetti, and Aid- 
rich. With the late Arthur Upson, whose own fine muse 
has given us some unforgetable songs and reveries, Mr. 
Braithwaite recalls happy hours of friendship beside the 
river Charles, where they pondered 

"The book our souls have writ in rhyme: 
Youth's golden chapters done in poetry." 

Beautiful creations of color and melody are frequent 
[129] 



Brandy wine Days 



in these pages; how the spirit responds to this Aprilian 
call— 

"Straight in the heart of the April meadows, 

Straight in the dream in the heart of you — 
Spring — in the glory of gleams and shadows, 
Flame and gossamer, green and blue !" 

In this New England poet we yet have one whose 
music has, as it were, a Southern affluence, a vein of pas- 
sion and haunting wistfulness. His is the "sapphic strain," 
as Harrison Morris calls it, — the power of breathing into 
his songs the ineffable note of tearful regret and wild, 
strange beauty. There is here more than one lyric that 
calls for music, none more surely than the sea-dream, 
"Ave and Vale": 

"O, far away across the beach 
The mist is in the sunset, 
And dreams lie low 

In the silence of the foam; 
Beyond the dim horizon 

Where the creeping darkness pauses 
I hear the grey winds calling 
And they lead desire home. 
O Ave to the evening star, 

And Vale to the setting sun; 
And a deep, deep sea across the bar 
Where the grey ivinds call and run." 
* * * 

A true poet of nature is Benjamin Franklin Leggett, 
of Delaware County. He sings of the out-door world 
in its rich summer and autumnal moods. Melodious and 
of easy flow, his verses picture the simple charm of our 
own countryside. He has written of the Brandywine, 

[130] 



New Poets 



"Stream of beauty,— Susqueco," using one of the ancient 
Indian names for the little river: 

"Through the shadows cool and dim, 
Willow-woven by the rim, 
Threading meadow lands of bloom 
Where the flowers give it room, 
Through a sweet idyllic dream 
Runs the naiad-haunted stream, — 
Ever crowning sweetest song 
Where the reeds and rushes throng: — 
Through the valley's green and gold 
Where the tides of battle rolled 
In the stormy days of old, 
Softly glide in rhythmic flow 
The pictured waves of Susqueco. 

"Susqueco, O Susqueco! 
How thy singing waters flow — 
From the fountains in the hills. 
From the laughing, limpid rills 
Fed by crystal dew and rain. 
Gleaming through the fields of grain, 
Dreaming by the slopes of fern, 
Where the lady-slippers burn, 
Where the ponderous mill-wheels turn, — 
Past the miller's dusty doors. 
By the lily-whitened shores, 
While the sunshine softly lies 
On the mirror of the skies! 

"Susqueco, O Susqueco! 
Whither do thy waters flow? 
Under arches builded wide — 
Rounded circles in the tide, 
Under bridges mossy, brown. 
Through the meadows flowing down, 
Through the woodland and the lea, 

[131] 



Brandy wine Days 



Singing ever towards the sea, 
Where thy song is hushed at last 
When the idle dream is passed 
In the infinite and vast, 
Thither do thy waters flow, 
Stream of beauty — Susqueco!" 



[132J 



EVEN-SONG 



"The thrushes sing in every tree; 

The shadows long and longer grow; 
Broad sunbeams lie athwart the lea; 

The oxen low; 
Round roof and tower the swallows slide; 

And slowly, slowly sinks the sun, 
At curfew-tide. 

When day is done.'' 

UGUST III. Twilight: the little ones have 
ceased their play beneath the trees, where they 
were scattering rose petals and unconsciously 
suggesting those pictures of sweet old-world children in 
the pages of Kate Greenaway. The petunias glimmer 
white and ghost-like above the filmy green of the grass; 
the soft ''tinkle-tinkle" of cow-bells never ceases as the 
herd feeds slowly across the field ; the swallows fly in low 
circles over the stream; and distant fragmentary talk and 
sounds of trotting hoofs tell of the people out for their 
Sunday evening drive. 

The frogs chant with dulcet and flute-like voices 
among the bulrushes and lily-pads; dusky night-moths flit 
hither and thither like strange spiritual things; early 
owls call from the thick spruces; the young moon is shep- 
herding her starry flocks; and the dark comes slowly on. 
The children, happy and tired, are seeking sleep, and one 
rosy little darling goes to dreamland with her mother's 
soft crooning of an evensong, — 

[133] 



Brandy wine Days 



Folded Are the Roses 



Folded are the roses and the lilies are asleep; 

Slumber, baby dear! 
In the peaceful heavens now the stars begin to peep; 

Slumber, baby dear! 
Far down the meadow the frogs are chanting low. 
Fire-flies are setting all their little lamps aglow. 

Slumber softly, dearie, 

After play-time wearj^ 

Mother sees the sickle moon along the sleepy west; 
Slumber softly, baby, slumber softly in thy nest. 
Thy downy nest! 

II 

Cattle from the clover-fields have all been driven home ; 

Baby, close thy eyes! 
From their mothers little lambs no longer wish to 
roam ; 

Baby, close thy eyes! 
Crickets in the hay-field and locusts in the tree 
Long ago have folded wings and ceased their melody. 

When the stars are gleaming 

Babies should be dreaming. 

Mother sees the sickle moon along the sleepy west; 
Slumber softly, baby, slumber softly in thy nest. 
Thy downy nest! 

[134] 



Even- Song 



III 

Yellow lights are twinkling in the far-off city towers ; 

Sleep, my little child ! 
Village bells are telling to the wind the drowsy hours; 

Sleep, my little child ! 
Father's put away the scythe, the harvesting is done ; 
Robins in the apple-boughs are silent every one. 

Mother o'er thy sleeping 

Gentlest watch is keeping. 

Mother sees the sickle moon along the sleepy west; 
Slumber softly, baby, slumber softly in thy nest. 
Thy downy nest! 



[135] 



A CUYP LANDSCAPE 




''All the long August afternoon. 
The drowsy streaju 
Whispers a melancholy tune. 
As if it dreamed of June, 
And whispered in its dream. 

"The silent orchard aisles are sweet 
With smell of ripening fruit. 
Through the sere grass, in shy retreat. 
Flutter, at coming feet, 
The robins strange and mute." 

UGUST IV. The old purple beech Is softly vol- 
uble this afternoon. I seem to hear wafture of 
spirit-whisperings from its thick-laid foliage stirred 
to lightest melody by the summer zephyrs, and to feel my- 
self in a way like a far-off brother of the Greeks of old, 
those sensitive folk to whom plashing fountain and bend- 
ing bough spoke familiarly and tenderly the supernal se- 
crets of their fair nature-world. 

I see the little water-willows bending above the Bran- 
dywine's green mirror ; across a distant field a farm-wagon 
moves slowly, gathering the last of the belated oats-harv- 
est; now and again the wood-pigeon calls plaintively from 
the tall grove of oaks, "thick-leaved, ambrosial;" the wild 
carrots hang their graceful heads, heavy with the morn- 
ing's shower ; down across the meadow the vast cloud-shad- 
ows move slowly and majestically; while the cattle feed 

[136] 



A Cuyp Landscape 



in unbroken peace or lie gently chewing the cud near the 
rose-mallows and the spicy peppermint. It is indeed a 
bland and harmonious day — how can I forget its loveliness, 
its magical thrill and spirit-music, or the enchanting 
nuances of gold and emerald where the sun plays upon 
the grass, now in full glow and now through the screen 
of drifting cloud-rack! 

"Good-bye, sweet day!" cried Celia Thaxter to ex- 
quisite hours like these, — in those pathetic verses which I 
have heard sung so often by one who puts her heart into 
the tender words: 

"Thou wert so fair from thy first morning ray; 

I have so loved thee, but cannot, cannot hold thee; 
Dying like a dream, the shadows fold thee. 
Slowly thy perfect beauty fades away, — 
Good-bye, sweet day! Good-bye, sweet day!" 

Would this beauty touch one so deeply, think you, if 
the scene were wholly a wild one? I cannot believe it. 
That team in the oats field, these quiet, meditative cattle, 
add the unnamed charm, the Virgilian quality that de- 
lights by reason of its blending of pristine nature with 
sure signs of man's immemorial association with the ven- 
erable farmlands and pasture-fields of the world. The 
great Turner felt this when he placed in his landscapes, — 
glorious with cloud and river and endless champaign — 
some random boat or barn, castle or arching bridge, ever 
some object that should remind us that man is in the 
midst of his inherited wealth of the antique earth. And 
Corot painted never an exquisite pastorale but he set amid 
his vaporous trees or beside his cool and tranquil ponds a 
band of wandering children, a peasant or two, or a wreath 

[137] 



Brandy wine Days 



of sylvan divinities, — adding a last magical pathos that 
makes him akin to Wordsworth in his particular appeal 
to the sentiment and love of the nature-v^rorshipper. 

There is another painter whose pastoral scenes repre- 
sent that quality of long-settled rural peace and ancient 
security which abounds in our Brandywine valleys — Al- 
bert Cuyp ; though his be Dutch landscapes, we may easily 
read into them our own home meadows. Cuyp reveals 
in its perfection the beauty of wide pasture-lands bathed 
all day long, and day after drowsy day, in "the moated 
glow of the amber sunlight," where the grazing cattle and 
the idle herd-boys seem to blend with the soft golden land- 
scape in one complete harmony. It was of this painter's 
cattle-scene, where the shepherd is playing his pipe, that 
Lloyd Mifflin has written lines that might almost have 
come from the pen of Keats, — 

"The very children gaze, and stop their play, 
Bound to the place by music's magic bands. . 
O piper of the picture, keep thy hands 
Forever on the flute, as here to-day; 
The world is full of noise, — pipe on, we pray! 
T^hy note the spirit hears, and understands." 

My favorite among the landscapes by Cuyp is his 
"Sunny Day." Utter serenity and golden stillness fill 
the lovely countryside, the distant stream and the misty ho- 
rizon. If there be sunlight of more absolute clarity and 
perfection of balmy brightness than here pictured, I do 
not know it. 

Idyllic beauty clothes the tranquil scene; 
The noiseless river winds with sweet delays 

[1381 




'Below the ancient grassy hill it flows' 



A Cuyp Landscape 



By far champaigns enwreathed in golden haze, 
And groves that softly o'er the water lean. 
Amid the meadow's herbage lush and green 

The quiet cattle rest with drowsy gaze, 

The while this sunniest of summer days 
Goes by in blissful calm and peace serene. 
How dear it were, amid these pleasant meads. 

These misty fields by morning dews empearled, 
To pass our days in unambitious deeds, 

Forgetful of the fevers of the world; 
And like yon river dreamy in the sun 
To glide unheard away when life were done! 



[139] 



IN SIR WILLIAM TEMPLETS GARDEN 

''Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, 
And Innocence, thy sister dear! 
Your sacred plants, if here below. 
Only among the plants will grow: 
Society is all but rude 
To this delicious solitude/' 

^ ["UGUST VII. There is a singular charm about 
% I Temple's familiar essays, the earliest of the kind, 
almost, written in England, They tell of an am- 
ple leisure, of long, quiet hours of reflection in old brick- 
walled gardens and beside fish-ponds unrufl?ied by any but 
the mildest of summer breezes. We easily step back into 
Sir William's antique century, and our vaunted erudition 
and our modern vanities slip from us as the simple-hearted 
gentleman leads us from one parterre to another, and be- 
neath the sun-baked walls where hang his rich grapes and 
warm-cheeked peaches, averring to us that French con- 
noisseurs have pronounced his fruit equal to any this side 
of Fontainebleau. Down the graveled paths we pass with 
our host, beyond the roses and slumbrous poppies, to the 
vegetable beds. Sir William, with his acquired Dutch 
taste, truly values these homely quarters; — has not King 
William himself honored the asparagus with a nod of 
recognition on his last visit to Moor Park, and even 
deigned to instruct Temple's young secretary, Jonathan 
Swift, in the art of eating the succulent plant? Here we 
listen to a discourse on garlic and onions as sovereign 

[140] 



In Sir JVilliam Temple s Garden 

remedies for all decays of appetite and as specifics for the 
gout. Our portly host has himself felt the twinges of the 
last-named complaint, yet he hastens to assure us with ele- 
gant euphemism that he has never long submitted to the 
constraint of a garlic diet, as being "offensive to the com- 
pany I conversed with." Elder-berries and elder-flowers, 
he says, will drive out watery humours; though here again 
he frankly confesses he cannot speak from any consider- 
able experience, having ''been always too libertine for any 
great and long subjections to make the trials." 

Beside his tobacco plants he pauses to remark that old 
Prince Maurice of Nassau put him upon taking a leaf of 
the plant into the nostrils for an hour each morning as a 
strengthener of the eyesight. 

His beloved garden yields its owner every simple, every 
remedy. Such prescriptions as crabs' eyes and claws and 
burnt eggshells for indigestion, to which the family was 
subject, Sir William rather scorns, for he turns as ever to 
his plants for a sure specific: "I have never found any- 
thing of much or certain effect [for indigestion], besides 
the eating of strawberries, common cherries, white figs, 
soft peaches or grapes, before every meal, during their sea- 
sons; and, when those are past, apples after meals; but all 
must be very ripe: And this, by my own and all my 
friends' experience who have tried it, I reckon for a spe- 
cific medicine in this illness so frequently complained of; 
at least, for the two first, I never knew them fail ; and the 
usual quantity is about forty cherries, without swallowing 
either skin or stone." But let us have a care not to eat 
too plentifully of these delectable strawberries and other 
fruits at Moor Park, for did not Dean Swift attribute his 

[141] 



Brandy wine Days 



life-long plague of giddiness and deafness to a surfeit of 
Sir William Temple's peaches? 

With such pleasant discourse even a kitchen garden 
becomes an enchanted spot, and we are willing listeners to 
our kindly host's disquisition on the spleen, ending with an 
injunction against harboring fear, regret and melancholy, 
and with an incitement to nourish hope as the sovereign 
balsam of life. So friendly is our dear old host, so sweetly 
philosophic, so amply fortified with the homely common- 
sense wisdom of the countryside. 

It was for some such country sage of elder days, surely, 
that Austin Dobson wrote these verses: 

"He liked the well-wheel's creaking tongue, — 
He liked the thrush that stopped and sung, — 
He liked the drone of flies among 

His netted peaches; 
He liked to watch the sunlight fall 
Athwart his ivied orchard wall, 
Or pause to catch the cuckoo's call 

Beyond the beeches." 



[142] 



"SWEET THEMMES! RUNNE SOFTLY'' 

AUGUST VIII 

WEET THEMMES! runne softly, till I end 

my Song": 
Old Spenser's words flow soft as any dream 
This afternoon by Brandywine's calm stream 
This green untroubled meadow-side along. 

Most clear it echoes down the tranquil stream — 

''Sweet Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song" ; 
O it hath filled my heart of memory long, 

Its quaint, rich music haunts me like a dream! 

It follows me and haunts me like a dream 

Whene'er I stroll this meadow-side along: 
''Sweet Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song," — 
Old Spenser chants forever by the stream. 

O heart of memory, cherish it for long. 
And let old Spenser's golden music stream 
Forever down the meadows of my dream — 

"Sweet Themmes! runne softly, till I end my Song." 



[143] 



IN QUIET WATERS 



'// is not idleness to steep the soul 
In nature's beauty: rather every day 
We are idle letting beauteous things go by 
\Jnheld, or scarce perceived. We cannot dream 
Too deeply, nor overprize the mood of love. 
When it comes on us strongly, and the hour 
Is ripe for thought," 

'UGUST X. On this bland and serene day of Au- 
gust I left our quiet Brandywine fields, to journey 
southward on the series of curving ponds and con- 
necting canals that afford a waterway between the Dela- 
ware river and the Chesapeake. 

On this side of Flanders, one could hardly look upon 
so sleepy and tranquil a panorama of low farm-lands, an- 
tique villages and green, reedy shores. How I wish the 
artist's power were mine, that I might put on canvas a 
tithe of all this slumbrous beauty and sweet pastoral 
repose ! 

Mists hang over the distant woods and make them 
most pale and remote; cattle graze in the rich deep mea- 
dows; and in the atmosphere brood the utter peace and 
restfulness which come over the countryside in the weeks 
following harvest, when scythe and fork are hung up once 
more and great hay-stacks and teeming barns tell of the 
summer's yield. 

On and away our steam-boat glided, over the silent, 
rush-margined waters, passing from one lovely view to an- 

[144] 



In ^luiet JVaters 



other. Great white flowers starred the green acres of 
swamp-grass, feathery willows drooped in soft clusters 
over the stream-side, wide patches of weed shone in many 
a shade of brown and yellow and sumptuous purple ; while 
the tow-path, with its dull coloring of red, wound ever 
away behind the verdant, bank. There was many a little 
pond in the adjacent fields, where water-lilies floated be- 
yond the swaying cat-tails; and over these unruffled wa- 
ter-mirrors, small white-breasted birds flitted and veered 
and sounded their blithe notes. 

We moved slowly by little garden-slopes, odorous with 
hop-vines and bright with old-time flowers, with apple- 
orchards and fields of tall corn beyond. White sails now 
and then appeared In the wider ponds, and often we came 
upon lazy fisher-folk, half asleep in the sunshine, their 
poles dipping into the noiseless stream. In the deep locks 
we halted while the great gates slowly swung open and 
the green water gurgled and foamed up from under its 
imprisoning barriers, and village loungers loitered about 
the banks to watch the only spectacle that breaks their 
day's monotony. 

The passengers felt the spell of the mild, placid atmos- 
phere, and little children crooned or looked dreamily at 
the white clouds and the misty vapors of that Idyllic af- 
ternoon. Up from the cabin came plaintive music; and 
elderly negroes, on their way to visit their old homes in 
Virginia or on the "East'n Sho','' chatted in their quaint 
and not immelodious dialect. 

Like a piece of Holland seemed this calm, untroubled 
land, with Its pastoral Industries, its sleepy atmosphere 
and Its peaceful felicities. Not more tranquil or dream- 

[145] 



Brandywine Days 



like could be ''the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po" that 
Goldsmith sang, nor those placid Flemish streams whereon 
a later lover of Old-WorJd waters, Robert Louis Steven- 
son, drifted and mused. 

"It could not be more quiet; peace is here 
Or nowhere; days unruffled by the gale 
Of public news or private; years that pass 
Forgetfully." 

There are, in that quiet land and along those still 
waters, the possibilities of a hundred pictures. The pho- 
tograph camera is used probably every day from the decks 
of these vessels; not so often, I fancy, comes an artist, 
one who can interpret landscape, catching its spiritual sig- 
nificance and giving the scene back to us clothed with 
a glamour and a charm which no camera can render. This 
little unsung bit of Delaware and Maryland possesses 
scenery worthy the brush of a Cuyp or a Corot. One who 
looks upon it in receptive mood, enjoying to the full its 
pastoral and watery loveliness, retains the impression of 
many perfect landscapes. Weary of the noise and fever 
and fruitless hurry of our vaunted modern life, one may 
here lose himself awhile, and drink of God's beauty with 
a free and grateful heart. 



[146] 



AFTER HARVEST 



AUGUST XII 

©Y fields where lately waved the yellow wheat 
And where the farmers piled the fragrant hay, 
The meadow-lark is calling clear and sweet, 
And through the drowsy day 
The clouds drift by above the peaceful hills; — 
I watch their soft reflections in the tide, 
Here where doth smoothly glide 
The Brandywine by ancient Slumberville. 

In old sequestered garden-alleys drowned 

In utter dreamfulness and flowery ease, 
The poppy petals fall without a sound. 

And lazy soft-winged bees 
Follow their honeyed quest with murmurs faint 

'Mid altheas and swaying hollyhocks, 

And stately purple phlox. 
And bergamot and lady-slippers quaint. 

I saw last month among the Goshen dales 

The sun-browned farmers haul the harvest in; 
I saw them busy in Pocopson vales; 

And here in green Newlin 
I watched the mowers in among the hay 

Heaping the windrows long and straight and clean. 

And sturdy reapers glean 
The nodding wheat on hillsides far away. 

[147] 



Brandy wine Days 



And here one evening as I lingered late 

I saw the last load coming down the hill, 
Sweep 'neath the cherry tree beside the gate 

And past the mossy mill ; 
And when those final sheaves of rustling oats 

Were added to the barn's abundant store, 

I heard by the wide door 
The ''Harvest Home!" ring out from lusty throats. 

But now no more the hai-vest mirth is heard 

By shady orchard-side or straggling hedge; 
The fields are silent, save where one sweet bird 

Chirps by the greenwood edge; 
Only the locusts chirr with pipings high, 

Only the melancholy ring-dove grieves 

Among the willow leaves. 
And rain-crows send from far their querulous cry. 

Along the dusty road wild-carrots nod. 

And thistle-down is wafted through the air; 
On woodland banks the early golden-rod 

Is swaying richly fair; 
And in the night beneath the golden moon 

Ripe apples drop beside the orchard wall, 

And oft with eerie call 
The shadowy owls give forth their spectral croon. 

How softly now the water-willows show 
Beside the brooks their delicate gray-green, 

And lovely as a landscape of Corot 
Appears each pastoral scene. 
[148] 



After Harvest 



Old Chester County's tranquil fields and woods 
Are sleeping in a languid atmosphere, 
And far away and near 

The misty dream of August basks and broods. 

With tender undersong the Brandywine 

Flows down by mossy stone and quivering reed, 
And he who rightly hears its chant divine 

May take but slender heed 
Of dulling cares that vex the passing hour; 

Kind Nature's nursling well may muse apart, 

For he, the glad of heart, 
Is brother born of cloud and stream and flower. 



[149] 



HUMPHRY MARSHALL 



UGUST XV. The old village of Marshallton, 
two or three miles up in the hills, contains two 
notable features, — an ancient Quaker graveyard, 
unsurpassable for its serenity and pensive charm, and the 
home of Chester County's renowned botanist, Humphry 
Marshall. The ample and dignified old dwelling-house is 
the heart of the sleepy hamlet, its one noble relic of the 
life of long ago. Surrounded by stately trees and an- 
tique shrubbery, the old mansion invites the passer-by to 
pause and reflect upon the original owner and his ardent 
devotion to American flora. 

Son of Abraham Marshall, who came over from Der- 
byshire in the late seventeenth century and married the 
daughter of James Hunt, one of William Penn's compan- 
ions, — Humphry Marshall had an inheritance of sterling 
Quaker character. He built this durable house with his 
own hands, somewhere about the year 1773, and planted 
his botanic garden with the best native trees and shrubs 
and many interesting foreign species. His oaks, pines, 
and magnolias, ''all planted by the hands of the venerable 
founder," as Dr. Darlington, his biographer, tells us, 
*'have now attained to a majestic altitude." 

It seems likely that Humphry Marshall felt drawn to 
botany and horticulture through the influence of his dis- 
tinguished cousin, John Bartram. To Marshall's zeal In 
making known to his European correspondents the treas- 
ures of American sylva and flora, posterity owes a large 
debt. I never pass the fine old mansion and grove with- 

[150] 



i 

Si. 




Humphry Marshall 



out a silent benediction, and a wistful thought of the se- 
rene enjoyments here pursued by the noble old-time Quak- 
er botanist. Happily his gentle science is still kept up by 
country Quakers here and there in Chester County; it is 
the sole branch of Nature-study on which these refined 
and quiet people pride themselves. 

Memorials of John Bartram and Humphry Marshall, 
which our later botanist, Dr. William Darlington, pub- 
lished in 1849, furnishes some charming reading. Here 
one may learn how Dr. John Fothergill, whose garden 
near London was noted for its Americana, was "obliged" 
for his treasures "to thy diligence and care," as he wrote 
to Marshall. In his quaint epistles to the New World 
botanist, Dr. Fothergill constantly mentions the plants he 
most desires. 

"There is a kind of Dogwood, whose calyx is its great- 
est beauty. ... I want a few plants of it; and, 
indeed, It would be always agreeable to receive young, 
well-rooted plants of any kind." Birds, too, he occasion- 
ally requests, — "Would it be impossible to send one of 
those pretty little Owls, alive? I wish I could see one." 
(What a personal note, that!) "Most of the captains 
In the trade, I believe, would endeavour to take care of It, 
and a Mocking-bird, if they could easily be had." Hum- 
phry even sent over a tortoise, and the good doctor, not 
aware of the creature's sluggish habits, wrote back, "He 
looked uncommonly heavy about the eyes, and did not care 
for stirring." 



[151] 



"COLIN CLOUTE*' 



My summer daj^s beside the Brandywine 

Are blent with dreams of old-world Lancashire 

And old-world shepherd songs. Thy Calender^ 

For many a year, great Spenser, have L loved: 

Thy rustic dialogues I love, — their quaint 

And honest friendliness, their kindly words 

'Twixt simple-hearted country folk. I love 

Thy jocund old-time carols, beautiful 

With music rippling like the meadow streams 

Where feed the white flocks of thy shepherd lads, — 

With plaintive love-notes sung to lasses blithe 

As summer breezes, — and with dear delight 

In all the sweet old English flowers that grew 

In Colin Clout's idyllic countryside. 

aUGUST XVI. "A masterpiece, if any" — so seemed 
to good Michael Drayton the Shepheardes Calen- 
der of Spenser; and herein Drayton showed him- 
self an admirable judge, worthy to be followed by poster- 
ity. These twelve ''aeglogues, proportionable to the twelve 
monethes" and inscribed to Philip Sidney, "president of 
noblesse and of chevalree," are indeed a treasure-house 
of quaint dialogue, of idyllic loves and sorrows, of homely 
countryside wisdom and beautiful English landscapes, and 
all presented in such a diction and melody as England had 
not heard since Chaucer's voice fell silent. The poem has, 
too, an autobiographic charm, the shepherd Colin Cloute 
being Spenser's own self. Colin Cloute, "under which 

[152] 



''Colin Clout e' 



name this Poete secretly shadoweth himself, as sometimes 
did Virgil under the name of TitjTus," — name ever dear 
to the poet, and resumed by him in riper age after com- 
posing his great and magnificent epic, — seems to call up a 
host of Spenser's ancestral associations, carrying us straight 
to that antique Lancashire where his family had long 
been settled. Behind the almost archaic vocabulary of 
the Calender, in its innocent Arcadian flavor and down- 
right simplicity, one readily constructs a mind-picture 
of an ancient provincial countryside, a quaint neighborhood 
where kindliness and home-bred affection abounded, where 
old-time farming and grazing mingled with rustic holi- 
days to fill the quiet lives of a contented and thrifty 
folk, — a corner of an English shire where an inherent 
family strain of religion and idealism have combined with 
staunch character to produce in the right season that 
gifted son of the house whom Milton was one day to call, 
in his matchless and superb way, "our sage and serious 
poet Spenser." 

The shepherd-names in these pastorals are for the most 
part frankly and rustically English, good honest names 
that smack of hayfield and byre and croft, — Cuddie, 
Willye, Thomalin, Piers, Diggon Davie, HobbinoU, — the 
last standing for Master Gabriel Harvey, that "very spe- 
ciall and most familiar freend, whom he entirely and extra- 
ordinarily beloved." It has not been my fortune to visit 
in Spenser's Lancashire, — that is still a cherished dream, — 
but in rural Oxfordshire I have watched the nibbling 
white-fleeced flocks straying in the soft emerald pastures 
besides the Thames; and in the lonely lads who, lying 
beside the hawthorn hedges, tended the sheep, I have fan- 

[153] 



Brandywine Days 



cied the modern counterpart of Cuddie and Diggon and 
Piers, although I confess I never heard them pipe or sing 
as piped and sang those jocund shepherd-lads in the pages 
of Spenser. 

Of the sumptuous golden harmony, the mellifluous 
cadences, and the unfailing nobility of ideal, that make 
the Faerie Queene glorious, there is abundant promise in 
these youthful eclogues. And so I have ever been of the 
same mind as Drayton concerning the Shepheardes Calen- 
der, and as Sidney, who averred that Spenser "hath much 
Poetrie in his Eglogues ; indeede w^orthy of the reading, if 
I be not deceived." If a choice must be made v^^here all 
is so inviting, this melodious praise and honoring of Queen 
Elizabeth by honest Hobbinoll, in the April "aegloga," 
may be taken as typical, — 

"Of fayre Elisa be your silver song, 

That blessed wight, 
The flowre of Virgins; may shee florish long 

In princely plight! 
For shee is Syrinx daughter without spotte, 
Which Pan, the shepheards God, of her begot: 

So sprong her grace 

Of heavenly race, 
No mortall blemishe may her blotte. 

"Tell me, have ye seene her angelicke face, 

Like Phoebe fayre? 
Her heavenly haveour, her princely grace. 

Can you well compare? 
The Redde rose medled with the White yfere, 
In either cheeke depeincten lively chere: 

Her modest eye. 

Her Majestie, 
Where have you seene the like but there? 

[154] 



^' Colin Cloute' 



"Bring hether the Pincke and purple Cullambine, 

With Gelliflowres; 
Bring Coronations, and Sops in wine, 

Worne of Paramoures; 
Strowe me the ground with Daffadowndillies, 
And Cowslips, and Kingcups, and loved Lillies 

The pretie Pawnee, 

And the Chevisaunce, 
Shall match with the fayre flowre Delice." 



[155J 



A DEAD POET 



'Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate, 

His name and life's brief date. 
Pray for him, gentle souls, whoe'er you be." 

UGUST XIX. "The cloud-capp'd towers, the 
gorgeous palaces" of the air rear themselves ma- 
jestically aloft this afternoon. A splendid as- 
semblage of white clouds moves in solemn slow proces- 
sion down the sky toward the deep and dreamy west. 
Like navies of stately argosies they seem, aerial galleons 
streaming along the zenith upon the blue ocean of the 
heavens. 

How he felt the sublimity of the clouds — that friend 
of mine who is no more! Every beautiful and noble 
thing touched him — the first anemones of April, the har- 
vest-field with its sheaves, the gleam and flash of wide wa- 
ters, and the quietude of solitary forests. In the words of a 
fellow-poet whose verse he admired, he might have said, 

"I have learned 
More from the hush of forests than from speech 
Of many teachers." 

But most he loved, I think, "the air of mountain sum- 
mits and head waters of rivers," to use his own words. 
Indeed it was his love of the solemn mountains that 
brought death to him. Wandering too early in the year 
among their frozen fastness, he "fell on sleep" amid the 
cold, pitiless purity of the snow; and the first flush of the 

[156] 



A Dead Poet 



unfolding springtime came without the welcome of his 
alert step along the wood paths or his affectionate gaze 
upon the "greening meadow-land." 

On Nature's highway he was a Passionate Pilgrim, 
truly; and his keen impressions he wove into delicate 
verse-forms. The sweet sincerity and the truth and san- 
ity of his character cannot perish from the remembrance 
of his friends. Let one of these offer a tribute, slender 
though it be, to his fair memory, — 

The tender loveliness of young spring skies. 
The gush and purl of pebbled streams. 

The sacred solitude of lofty woods 
Enwrapped in vernal dreams. 

Faint, sweet earth-odors rising from the fields, 

The primal fragrance of the year — 
Alas, these now must come unheralded 

Of one who held them dear! 

For nevermore by "greening meadow-land," 

By wood-walk cool or lonely hill, 
In reverie will our young Thyrsis stray 

With poet-heart a-thrill. 

No more in hidden, far-off forest dells 

For April's first flowers will he seek. 
Nor thread the groves of "sunlit sassafras" 

By Swarthmore's winding creek. 

Again the pale hepaticas come forth, 
And Quaker-ladies star the mold; 
[157] 



Brandywine Days 



But he, our lost and loved one, cometh not 
To greet them as of old. 

For as with those shy, tender things he loved. 
Blossoms and buds of fragile bloom, 

Windflower, veronica and violet. 
His was an early doom. 

Softly the beautiful spirit winged its way 

Like music fading in the night ; 
He fell asleep amid our mortal shade 

To wake in the great light. 

And in the plash of April's silvery rains 

That blur the vale with misty tears, 
I seemed to hear the young Spring make lament 

For his unfinished years. 

What mystery, what beauty, now is his 
In shining realms, we may not know; 

But this we know, — his days were blameless, pure 
As that enshrouding snow 

Swept by the winds whose sombre requiem 
Deep in our grieving hearts shall ring 

And mar, like some untimely winter blast. 
The joyfulness of spring. 



[158] 




The woodland cool and still" 



CITIES OF THE HEART 



AUGUST XX 

^Y^ HO has not some city — the city par excellence — 
\l/ cherished by him in memory, or only in imagi- 
nation it may be, which is to him what Venice 
was to Lord Byron? 

"I loved her from my boyhood, she to me 
Was as a fairy city of the heart." 

Whether it be Oxford or Edinburgh, Florence or 
Heidelberg, Charleston or green Amherst, it forms for us 
a beautiful background, seen or dreamed of, which no 
new-found city may dislodge from our affection, no 
newly-pictured metropolis ever surpass. 

So I think this fresh, fragrant morning, while reading 
that fascinating volume 'The American Scene," wherein 
Henry James paints fresh word-pictures of certain of 
our older American cities. Beneath the elaborate pano- 
plies wherewith Mr. James delights to deck his medita- 
tions, the sympathetic reader discovers a very subtle 
power of apprehending the essential spirit of the partic- 
ular city under discussion. This gifted cosmopolitan 
confesses allegiance to no special one of our old towns — 
his love is too catholic for that; yet he has spent his best 
emotion upon each place while visiting and writing of It. 
The result is an analysis hardly to be equaled by any 
living prose-writer; I shall not say by any living poet, 
for we have more than one among us, I believe, who 

[159j 



Brandywine Days 



might put into a sonnet or a twilight song the whole 
spiritual aspect of Manhattan, or of New Orleans 
dreaming in the sunlight. Has not Wordsworth, in four- 
teen lines, painted for all time vast, quiet London sleep- 
ing in early morning mist? 

"And all that mighty heart is lying still." 

But another story is that — of the poets. Before 
leaving them I may say, however, that Henry James' essay 
on Baltimore is as near being poetry — in its mellow, 
loving musing on the secluded and stately capital of 
Maryland — as could be desired, yet with just enough 
smiling playfulness to keep his mood on this side idolatry. 
"The deep, soft general note;" the embowering foliage 
that creates "great classic serenities of shade" almost in 
the manner of Claude or of Turner; "the sweet old 
Carroll house, nestling under its wood in the late June 
afternoon, and with something vaguely haunted in its 
lonely refinement" — what Baltimorean but will feel 
more keenly his attachment to the old city after reading 
these and like matchless bits of portraiture? And so of 
Owen Wister's effective and appealing apprehension of 
Charleston's sorrowful old-world charm and high-bred 
inherited grace, here and there throughout his "Lady 
Baltimore." Mr. James and Mr. Wister have given us, 
if we be sufficiently sympathetic, at least two new cities 
of the heart which we take unto ourselves by very benev- 
olent assimilation. 

Pierre Loti must come to mind in any such consider- 
ation. He and Lafcadio Hearn, when we are in the mood 
for it, can give us gorgeous coloring and lovely harmon- 

[160] 



The Cities of the Heart 



ies of light in their rendition of a city's particular atmos- 
phere and peculiar beauty. For Loti's new story, ''Dis- 
enchanted," yields a brilliant picture that will delight 
any to whom Constantinople is one of these cities of the 
heart. All the house of old Stamboul that stood low 
down by the sands seemed, at sunset, he writes, "blurred 
and blotted out, as it were, by the eternal violet haze of 
the evening, a mist of vapor and smoke. Stamboul 
changed like a mirage; no details were now visible — 
neither the decay nor the misery, nor the hideousness of 
some of the modern structures; it was a mere mass in 
outline, dark purple with edges of gold, a colossal city 
In cut jasper, bristling with spires and domes, set up as a 
screen to shut out a conflagration in heaven." 

Better still than the reading of it is, of course, the 
personal experience. To see many-towered Oxford dream- 
ing beside the sleepy Thames, and to hear her silver 
chimes pealing the vesper-hour, as one lingers in old 
Worcester College quadrangle, that "beautiful green 
seclusion with its sloping bank of the most exquisite turf, 
Its old buildings, and the vistas of boscage beyond, — 
wholly away from the noisy world ;" — to watch Edinburgh 
Castle lift its ancient turrets against a purple and orange 
sunset sky; — to stroll under the green elms of Amherst 
on a magical night of summer moonlight; — to see, from 
Riverside drive, the Hudson and all her serried shipping 
fade into the rose and silver of twilight; — how such 
experiences touch the very springs of pathos and give us 
unforgetable memory-pictures of our Cities of the Heart! 



[161] 



MY LADY SLUMBERS'' 



gUGUST XXI. The fifth birthday of little 
"Bunny" of the thoughtful eyes. All day he 
and the band of bonnie cousins have made merry, 
trooping over the grass with shout and song, sailing their 
boats in the pellucid shallows of the stream, and at noon 
sharing the birthday feast beneath the old apple tree. And 
when they joined hands and danced gleefully in a ring 
over the exquisite sward, — Bunny and Brown-Eyes and 
Ray and the other sweet bairns, — old John Lyly's playful 
lines came to mind, — 

"Trip it, little urchins all ! 
Lightly as the little bee, 
Two by two, and three by three." 

It was wholly charming, the series of pictures these 
little innocents unconsciously presented. Here was sub- 
ject-matter for painter and poet truly; — but how many 
sights like these pass by unrecorded ! Nay, not wholly so, 
for do they not impress themselves indelibly in the memory 
of the parents and friends of children, there ever to remain 
as a joy and a consolation? Yet, too beautiful almost for 
words, they must fail of record save on the tablets of the 
heart ! 

**Who shall explain this lovely thing 

To generations yet to be? 
Will evanescent beauty wing 
Her flight to dim futurity?" 

Now the tired children lie dreaming after their happy 
[162] 




''The brook 
Sings on tvith ceaseless music' 



"My Lady S/umi^ers'' 



hours in the sun; the great white cloud-land has melted 
into the dim purple of twilight; from the shadowy fields 
draped in mist floats the faint tinkle of cowbells; and the 
utter quietude of a summer night is closing down upon 
our valley and lonely hills. Then, as the moon rises in 
pallid radiance and swims slowly above the belt of mists, 
a boat puts out on the stream; clear voices are lifted in 
song, and over the tranquil air vibrate the majestic meas- 
ures, — 

"Integer 'vitae s ceteris que pur us 

Non eget Mauris jaculis, nee arcu, 
Nee venenatis gravida sagittis, 
Fusee, pharetra." 

One of the stateliest of all songs, I have ever accounted 
that ode of Horace. That, and Ben Jonson's "Drink to 
me only with thine eyes," as chanted to their ancient music, 
are magnificent, — there is no other word to describe them ! 
The first song we learned from a rare teacher who made 
Virgil and Horace and Catullus living voices through his 
fine penetration and subtle appreciation; the second, with 
its solemn and noble sweetness, was learned from another 
fine teacher and literary guide, who brought to his read- 
ing of the Elizabethan poets a charm that was unforget- 
able. 

And now the plangent and sonorous Latin dies away 
on the shadows, and there follows the light harmony of 
**My Lady Slumbers." As the delicate rhythm of the 
song rises up from the drifting boat, with its recurrent 
refrain, "My Lady Slumbers," I think of the little folk 
dreaming behind yonder curtained pane, hushed and 

[163] 



Brandy wine Days 



soothed to balmy sleep. Fragrant darkness clothes them 
round; the old ancestral Mansion holds them securely in 
sheltering arms; and they gather for the morrow fresh 
buoyancy and radiant healthfulness. 



[164J 



COUNTRY PEACE 



AUGUST XXII 



G 



OUNTRY peace, the warbling birds, 
Friendly faces and friendly words, 



Grassy fields and tranquil streams. 
Cloud-lands beautiful as dreams, 

Singing brooks that wander slow 
Where buttercups and daisies grow, 

Old barn roofs where drowsy doves 
Sit in the sun and tell their loves, 

Robins whistling clear and sweet 
Over the acres of swaying wheat, 

Children playing among the flowers 
And singing away the sunny hours, 

Rosy country girls and boys 
Filling the day with happy noise. 

Old-time garden-walks that seem 
Haunts of reverie and dream, 

Poets' books to read at ease 
Under the bowering orchard trees, 

Memories that wistful go 
Back to the golden Long Ago, 

[165] 



Brandy wine Days 



Faith that He who rules above 
Encompasses this earth with love, 

Faith that His mercies never cease:— 
These are the joys of country peace. 



[166] 



fe;-' 


-' ^- - r. ■ 


^^': 


t • . V*- 


^^ai 




wI^^m'.. 




'' \€%^:^:'Jm.,.iB- 




-^-^^^v^ - 


Sk^Ih^p^^'^^sH^^^^I 


'^pH 


r 1 







UP STREAM 



g 



UGUST XXIII. Robert Louis Stevenson makes 
his canoe tell of its quiet wanderings, — 

"I with the leaping trout 
Wind, among lilies, in and out; 
I, the unnamed, inviolate, 
Green, rustic rivers navigate; 
My dipping paddle scarcely shakes 
The berry in the bramble-brakes; 
Still forth on my green way I wend 
Beside the cottage garden-end ; 
And by the nested angler fare, 
And take the lovers unaware. 
By willow wood and water-wheel 
Speedily fleets my touching keel; 
By all retired and shady spots 
Where prosper dim forget-me-nots." 

Up stream I paddled on the Brandywine this morn- 
ing, between pastures redolent of August's yellow prim- 
roses and rag-weed and the pungent life-everlasting; be- 
side little thickets of buttonwood saplings and feathery 
willows that dip into the current and sway perpetually; 
over glassy reaches where only an occasional skimming 
bird or leaping fish broke the stillness of the watery mir- 
ror, and where a yellow leaf or two drifting down, — early 
premonition of autumnal decay — seemed like "the fairy- 
people's boats," as little Ray loves to name them. Mild 
cows raised their heads in quiet astonishment at the inva- 
sion of their retirement; congresses of light water-bugs 
scudded hither and thither before the prow, and assembled 

ri67] 



Brandy wine Days 



again to discuss this visitor from Brobdingnag. In high 
boughs the locusts hummed in strident chorus; blue her- 
ons flapped past on leisurely wing; and one friendly little 
green-backed bird hopped from twig to twig of an over- 
arching ash, observing with his bright black eyes the 
strange craft and the red paddle blades. 

Beautiful the swift rush and silver laughter of green 
water down the rapids where I waded and drew the canoe 
up the turbid slope; beautiful the sand beds in the calmer 
shallows, flecked with sunshine and haunted by shoals 
of glancing minnows; and beautiful the varied pebbles 
beneath the clear element, — mossy green^ peacock blue, 
gleaming black, but most of them golden-brown, or fair 
white laved to an immaculate purity. 

"O the clean gravel ! 
O the smooth stream!" 

Here in these up-stream meadows, buried amid their 
encircling hills, is peace, surely! Here is the same un- 
changed primeval little river of the far centuries when the 
Indians named it "Susqueco" or "Wawassan" and here 
pitched their leathern homes, and called the fish and the 
water-fowl their brothers. But a distant farm bell ringing 
the men to dinner calls me back from those vanished In- 
dian scenes; and rushing down the foaming, plashing 
rapids to the delicious melody of the cool lapping wavelets, 
and out along the willowed banks and "above the golden 
gravel," the canoe sweeps out again into the wide calm 
reaches between the familiar pastures and in sight of 
the red gables of the old House. 



[168] 



UP THE DELAWARE 



UGUST XXVI. Enamored of the charm of the 
water journey toward Baltimore, I to-day essayed 
the broad Delaware. Watching, from a quiet 
corner of the deck, the green shores, the brimming and 
shining river and the passing craft, memory transported 
me to the old-world streams of England. I thought of 
how to us of Saxon lineage those English rivers are per- 
haps without rivals in the world, for to their scenic beauty 
is added the crowning interest of prolonged and immemo- 
rial human association. The tranquil Thames, winding 
through golden meadows and past the cloisters of Oxford 
and Eton, reflecting in its bosom the hoary towers of 
Windsor and the sedges of Runnymede ; the pastoral Avon, 
beside whose green shores the boy Shakespeare ofttimes 
dreamed; dear Cowper's languorous river Ouse; the 
Duddon and the Wye, with their memories of Words- 
worth; the mighty Severn, flowing by the grave of Hal- 
lam, and rich with old Celtic memories; — these and a 
score of other English streams are so freighted with ro- 
mance and association that their very names are beautiful. 
Hundreds of years must pass ere our American rivers 
become so surcharged with the glamour of a lengendary 
past; yet we have many streams whose natural beauty 
may easily be enhanced if one will bring to his enjoyment 
of them an imagination open to the inner meaning of things 
— the spiritual vision which Wordsworth has awakened 
in the lovers of his poetry. Such a stream is the Dela- 

[169] 



Brandy wine Days 



ware; and between Wilmington and Penn's Manor there 
is a noble variety of river scenes. 

The broad, majestic aspect of the lower river, and the 
more pastoral beauty of the upper stretches, might not 
inaptly be compared to the special charm of the Severn 
and of the Thames respectively. 

Gazing upon the shipping, as the steamboat cleaves 
the broad tide of the river above Wilmington, one is im- 
pressed with the pictures made by the varied craft that 
sail or steam along the watery highway. Here are slow 
barges with wide spread of dark canvas glassed in the clear 
tide; hay-boats piled high with fragrant brown and green 
grass cut in Delaware marshes; great steamers that are 
soon to trample the wide ocean's paths, bound for some 
far port or tropic isle, sweeping by majestically and fad- 
ing over the soft horizon, leaving nothing but a trail of 
ghostly smoke. 

Along the shores are frequent river walls that hold 
back the waters from the rich underlands where bloom 
the blue-starred flags and tall weeds of golden flower. 
Country-houses and villas are nestled among the trees 
on the high Pennsylvania shores, and on the opposite 
bank stand silent woodlands that reach inland and stretch 
away mile upon mile in misty beauty. 

A glorious river this; — its wide, brimming tides, un- 
ruffled in their serenity, unwearying in their stately on- 
ward sweep, are the symbol of power and majesty and 
endurance, teaching us the lesson of faithfulness and si- 
lent unwavering devotion. One who would try to record 
in some small measure his impressions of the river's deeper 
significance must exclaim, v/ith good old Sir John Den- 
ham, — 

[170] 



up the Delaware 



"O, could I flow like thee, and make thy Stream 
My great Example, as it is my Theme !" 

Passing the serried masts, the tangle of dark cordage 
and the clangor and unrest of the Philadelphia wharves, 
the traveler finds himself once more amid green waters 
and green meadow-lands. In our wake the clean white 
foam tumbles and breaks and wastes away on the far 
water-line. We pass the shady towns that slope to the 
stream-side — Riverton and Beverly, Burlington and Bris- 
tol — the beauty and soft charm of the peaceful scenery 
increasing with every mile. Here is hardly a suggestion of 
the commercial aspect of the river, as it winds between 
placid fields and enchanted woods. 

The ripeness and glamour of the coming autumn brood 
over these farms and orchards, lighting the banks with 
graceful golden-rod and flushing the apples with tender 
crimson. Here and there white ducks are feeding among 
the sedges, and on the breeze comes the complaining note of 
some lonely water-bird. The level meadows are severed 
from the river's edge by corridors of white-stemmed syca- 
mores, soft willows and pendent water-birches. Gleam- 
ing beneath the shadow^s are cardinal-flowers, fairest of 
riverside blooms, and pink mallows and bone-set and blue 
gentians. The faint, sweet aroma of rag-weed comes from 
the meadows; white barley-fields stand out in contrast to 
the encircling green; and, save for an occasional farmer 
with his cart, all is at rest. The very spirit of blissful 
peace pervades this opulent and dreamy countryside, — 
"Elysian quiet, without toil or strife." 

The upper Delaware has notable associations. Here, 
at Penn's Manor, or Pennsbury Manor as it was formerly 

[171] 



Brandywine Days 



called, once dwelt the great Founder of our Common- 
wealth. The legend of his whilom residence is all that 
one hears of him in the neighborhood ; and of any relic 
of the original manor buildings little remains, save the 
stone foundations of the brew-house. But the landscape 
must be essentially unaltered, and one can imagine how 
dear to the great-hearted Quaker must have been his hours 
of retirement in this lovely and sequestered spot. 

At Bordentown, a few miles further up the river, is 
the stately park where Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples 
and of Spain, found an ideal seclusion when the fortunes 
of his unhappy brother were waning. The mansion is 
now a seminary for Catholic priests; and, as one sees the 
young acolytes slowly pacing in meditation down the si- 
lent, leafy avenues and across the wide lawns, he thinks 
this a happy sanctuary for those who are consecrating 
themselves for spiritual service in a great and venerable, 
though sadly misunderstood, church. 

I have spoken of the charms of the ride up the Dela- 
ware. When this voyage is prelude, as was mine, to a visit 
at one of the peaceful farmsteads along the shore, where a 
genuine, old-time hospitality prevails, and the noises of the 
world seem far away, one's happiness and satisfaction are 
complete. The hours pass but too rapidly, and among the 
memories carried away there stands out the picture of the 
beauteous river, — almost encircled, as it seems, with its 
curving shores, and fair as the Shannon or the middle 
reaches of the Thames ; Its glassy waters at eve dying away 
into the mists and golden vapors of sunset, as in some won- 
drous painting of Turner's, touching the soul with inde- 
finable longing and pathos. 

[172] 



up the Delaware 



"O happy river, could I follow thee ! 
O yearning heart that never can be still ! 
O wistful eyes, that watch the stedfast hill." 

The bright, unsullied stream, the exquisite green and 
gold of the sweet meadow edges, the glory of the drifting 
cloud-land above — could one ask for more beautiful as- 
surance of the Father's love for us? 



[173] 



BELOW THE BRIDGE 



AUGUST XXVII 

©ELOW the bridge the Brandywine curves down 
Through open meadows sleeping in the sun, 
And O so green and soft ! — they seem indeed 
Like upper Thames-side pastures, though more wild 
And more remote from life. The willows here 
So green and silvery seem, — I think Corot 
Would have rejoiced to paint them, filmy-fair 
And full of emerald softness as they are. 
Wide realms of grass and nodding weeds are here, 
And at far intervals great hickory trees 
Tower beautiful and stately toward the sky. 
Remote and dim the busy farm-life seems, 
Here where the flickers fly and locusts drone 
In slumbrous chorus, and the lonely crow 
Calls sadly o'er the corn-fields on the hill. 

Below the bridge and at the second curve 
A little island lies, the very heart 
Of this romantic landscape, warm and green, 
A faery island, round whose tiny shores 
The silver water sweeps in steady flow, 
All bubbling, fresh, and exquisitely clear. 
A leafy thicket clothes the little isle, — 
Small willow bushes, sprigs of sycamore, 
And yellow flowers that dip into the stream, 
With white bone-set thick clustered ; not a foot 
Of this small territory but has caught 

[174] 



§ 



TO 




Below the Bridge 



Some wandering seed, to grow Into green life 
And flourish in the sun and watery air. 

Below the bridge my silent slim canoe 
Bears me o'er bubbling shallows and acros:3 
The calm expanse of peaceful waters green, 
And by the faery isle. The channel here 
So narrow is, the paddle sweeps the grass 
And yellow blossoms as I hurry by 
Adown the foamy slope and out beyond 
To the long reach below the willow trees, 
Where all is tranquil as a golden dream. 
— O little river shining in the sun, 
Soft meadows, stately trees and elfin isle, — 
Your charm endures forever, and the years 
Reveal fresh beauty to my musing gaze! 
Where'er I go I hold you in my heart 
And love to dream of magic summer hours 
Where curves the Brandywine below the bridge. 



[175] 



THE DREAM RIVER 



'UGUST XXVIII. To the Susquehanna our pil- 
grimage led us to-day. 

Is there a river more enchanting in its beauty 
than this Pennsylvania stream of the resounding Indian 
name ? As lovely as the Lakes of Killarney it seems, with 
its rich grassy islets, its broad expanse of rippling silver 
and its misty purple hills. As w^ith Tennyson among the 
Irish lakes, so on these w^aters it w^ould seem easy to hear 

"sweet and far, from cliff and scar, 
The horns of elf-land faintly blowing." 

Beside the Susquehanna it w^as, that Coleridge would 
have planted his little Republic. Here Robert Louis Ste- 
venson, awaking at dawn as the emigrant train rolled over 
the long bridge, asked the name of the river. 'The beauty 
of the name," he wrote, "seemed to be part and parcel of 
the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fit- 
ness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was 
at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no 
other could be, for that shining river and desirable val- 
ley." 

And in his sonnets, Lloyd Mifflin, who has long nour- 
ished his fancy in contemplating his native stream, has 
celebrated its solemn grandeur and its fairy loveliness, ex- 
claiming: 

"O river islands that in clusters lie 
As beautiful as clouds ! ye are my own. 
Ye hold my heart, and shall until I die." 

[176] 



The Dream River 



We were conveyed to mid-stream in an antique steam- 
boat, like Fulton's own "Clermont" in its rude simplicity, 
— the helmsman standing high on the roof and moving his 
long tiller-bar with easy and majestic grace. The splendid 
reach of wooded hills fading league beyond league in the 
luminous distance, the languorous mirage of cloud-land 
shot through and through with the shafts of the sun, the 
mystery and glamour that brooded over the sleeping isles 
and the silver and amber waters, — all made a picture in- 
effable and unforgetable. 

O Lordly Stream, whose sparkling waters sweep 
By cloven cliffs and mountains forest-stoled. 
Or spread in silent leagues where mists of gold 

Hang o'er soft islands in the silver deep ; 

Fair as some phantom river seen in sleep 
Art thou, to whom the Indians of old 
Gave thy melodious name, in days when rolled 

Primeval thunders round thy headlands steep. 

Of thee the young and ardent Coleridge dreamed 
As loveliest of the waters of the west; 

To Stevenson thy beauty peerless seemed; — 
But thine own Mifflin, to whose loving eye 
Thy multitudinous isles "in clusters lie 

As beautiful as clouds," — he knows thee best. 



[177] 



THE UPPER BRAND YWINE 

In these high breezy fields the little rill 
Dances and sings, a joyous infant stream, 

Nor knows what amplitude it will attain, 
Far down the land, of majesty and dream. 

UGUST XXX. A day of wandering beside the 
young Brandywine, far up in the northern town- 
ships, a day of soft white clouds and fresh sun- 
shine; "the land was all in a golden, wonderful radiance, 
and the clear streams glittered in the light, and the leaves 
of the trees danced with exultation in a wind blowing from 
the west." Among wild meadows and tiny woodland lawns 
of exquisite green turf I strolled, where the miniature river 
purled and sang over gray and golden sands. Here were 
no deep pools where sulky carp or sliding turtle might bask, 
but only clear shallows, — peopled by poUywogs and tiny 
minnows, — hurrying down the pebbly slopes and swirling 
past red willow roots, or drifting lazily in the tranquil 
sunny reaches of smooth, slow water. 

It is a fine upland country through which the youthful 
Brandywine curves and wanders, a country-side open to 
the sun and the fresh breezes, where the air has a sweet, 
tonic quality and the oxen plowing the brown hillsides look 
tranquil and com.fortable. To follow the stream through 
all its wanderings is to pass close to ancient farm walls and 
bright old-time gardens, under little arching bridges and 
beside grassy swamps and cressy islands. 

Far off sounds the shriek of the steam-thresher, and the 
cries of farmers at their harrowing float across the fields; 

[178] 



The Upper Brandy wine 



but the happy little faery river holds on its peaceful way, 
and its mood is that of eternal holiday. A score of miles 
down-stream lie those wide and stately reaches of the full- 
grown Brandywine, — 

"Contented river ! in thy dreamy realm — 
The cloudy willow and the plumy elm ; 
They call thee English, thinking thus to mate 
Their musing streams, that oft with pause sedate 
Linger through misty meadows for a glance 
At haunted tower or turret of romance." 

But if our Chester County stream recalls the rivers of 
England in its ampler stretches among the Pocopson mea- 
dows and near old Birmingham, — in these high upper 
miles of its course it seems like the fresh, bubbling streams 
of Scotland, and the stroller might almost imagine himself 
walking by Doon or Afton-water. 

Acres of golden-rod border the stream in these last 
days of summer, and there is field after field of j^ellow and 
purple and white blooms, bone-set, ironweed, sumac, this- 
tles, the lacy wild carrot, red berry bushes, thickets of 
reddening dogwood, and many a little patch and cluster 
of ragweed and yellow star-flowers, belated daisies and 
splendid cardinal-flowers. 

Now and then the stream w^idens out into a pond for 
ice ; here the water is steely-blue in the fresh breeze. But I 
love the little stream best in its wild natural beauty, among 
the willow groves and the black rocks and the upland 
meadows. There It has all the fascination of lonely and 
sequestered Nature, and the same charm that pervades 
the coombes of old Somerset where Wordsworth and Cole- 
ridge roved and dreamed in the old days. 

[179] 



THRESHING THE WHEAT 



UGUST XXXI . "O happy, beyond human hap- 
pinesSj had they but the sense of their blessings, 
the husbandmen, for whom of herself, far away 
from the shock of arms. Earth, that gives all their due, 
pours out from her soil plenteous sustenance. . . 
Then let me delight in the country and the streams that 
freshen the valleys — let me love river and woodland with 
an unambitious love." 

Thus wrote Virgil of the Georgics, concerning the 
half-idyllic life which he saw about him in the country- 
side of ancient Italy. Virgil's praise of the rural life can- 
not, unhappily, be wholly echoed in our day, with farm 
labor so hard and the returns so moderate; yet we must 
go to the country to find true old-fashioned contentment, 
and in the operations of agriculture much remains that 
would charm Virgil himself. Indeed some of our modes 
of tillage have scarcely changed since the day of the great 
Augustan poet. I have seen husbandmen in the Alban 
Hills plowing with just such primitive wooden implements 
as Virgil or Horace saw; and our modern plow, save for 
its metal construction, is essentially the same thing. So 
with the dairy operations, and the other simple processes of 
remoter farming districts. 

Although the complex reaper-and-binder and the 
steam-thresher were undreamed of in the elder days, there 
is in the pulsing rhythm and large activity of our threshing 
operations something of a poetry that has not gone out 
with the flail and the old-time grain-fan. 

[180] 



Threshing the Wheat 



All this golden afternoon the engine has kept up its 
humming roar; the men in the dim and dusty atmos- 
phere of the barn, like the solemn and mystic figures Mil- 
let loved to portray, have swung the sheaves down from 
the mows to feed the thresher; they have measured the 
fast-pouring grain, and piled the falling straw in the long 
sheds. Now and then the children have ventured, half- 
terrified, to look on at the strange scene; but the swallows 
and the pigeons have quite fled the unwonted invasion of 
their quietude. In the farmer's house there has been a 
vast confusion of preparation for the supper that is to feed 
near a score of half-famished men. But the period of 
stress is a brief one, — in a day all the wheat and oats have 
been threshed; and then the engine, fuming and panting 
like an uncanny monster, labors heavily down the road to 
the next farm, to affright the brooding pigeons and throw 
the kitchen folk into a fever of activity. 

Threshing the grain is one of the crowning acts of 
the country labors. In these few hours the farmer be- 
holds, in the sacks of yellow wheat and oats, the realiza- 
tion of all his long weeks of plowing and planting, all his 
patient watching of his green growing acres and of his 
harvesting the heavy sheaves. 

Charles Tennyson-Turner, — whose early poetry was 
admired by Coleridge, whose sonnets were dear to "Old 
Fitz" and to the Laureate brother Alfred, — delighted to 
record in his perfect verse the scenes of the simple farm life 
about his Lincolnshire vicarage. His sonnet, "The Steam 
Threshing Machine," with its affectionate reference to 
Virgil, fills a notable page in the poetic farmer's calendar. 



[181] 



Brandy wine Days 



'Flush toith the pond the lurid furnace burn'd 
At eve, ivhile smoke and vapour fill'd the yard, 
The gloomy <winter sky ivas dimly starr'd. 
The Hy-'wheel ivith a melloiv murmur turn'd; 

'While, ever rising on its mystic stair 
In the dim light, from secret chambers borne. 
The straiv of harvest, sever' d from the corn, 
Climb'd and fell over, in the murky air. 

7 thought of mind and matter, ivill and law, 
And then of him nvho set his stately seal 
Of Roman ivords on all the forms he saw 
Of old-world husbandry: I could but feel 
With what a rich precision he would draw 
The endless ladder and the booming wheel!" 



[182] 



AUTUMNAL HOURS 



'EPTEMBER I. ''The April rain-storms and the 
gilded suns of May have more of a sadness than 
the Autumn leaves. There is a sympathy in beau- 
tiful leaves that fall at the flush of their heightening color, 
and we know they are tired with the dust and fevered with 
light. It is only a sweet relief to lie back on the bosom of 
earth and cover our graves. So we love them for it.'' 

These words of a friend seem in harmony with one's 
feeling in this the waning season of the year. There is 
a nameless spell in the name September that captivates the 
fancy, — a romance and a glamour that thrill one and put 
him in the mood for reading and re-reading Keats' "Ode 
to Autumn," with its magical brooding upon all of the 
ripeness, the opulent abundance and the dreamy charm 
of this 

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." 

The change from yesterday, Summer, to to-day, Au- 
tumn, is but one of the calendar, to be sure, and we shall 
yet have weeks when we shall think "warm days will never 
cease"; yet I confess to a susceptibility to the power of 
suggestiveness, and can say of the word Autumn, as did 
Keats of Endymion, 

"The very music of the name has gone 
Into my being." 

Yesterday the roses shed their petals in silken drifts on 
the soft grass, and the ragweed in the meadows was of a 

[183] 



Brandy wine Days 



delicious fragrance. To-day the winds are swaying the 
crowns of the solemn oaks, and seem to say, — This day we 
come to our own. The bloom and fragrance and lazy for- 
getfulness of the vanished Summer must ere long become 
only a memory; to-day we sound our herald trumpets, 
summoning the hosts of the fields and gardens to yield 
their fruits and pass into nothingness. The ranks of wil- 
lows shall drop their yellowing leaves one by one into the 
silent stream, the serried troops of corn shall give up their 
golden store and turn sere on a thousand hills where the 
crows are sadly calling. Marigolds and asters and late- 
lingering roses — all the fair and graceful companions that 
gladden garden and dooryard — shall perish in the paling 
October suns. The nuts shall fall in the yellow glades and 
the sweet birds vanish from the woodlands; and Solitude 
shall again take possession of the once-lovely world ! 

Yea, — and those winds are calling to us too ; and with 
mingled regret and hope soon we must leave these tranquil 
Brandywine meadows and this old red-gabled House below 
the hills. Away we must turn from this sylvan peace and 
seclusion, where the invisible forces play round us their 
harmonies, and the days are calm and untroubled as in a 
dream, — away to crowded thoroughfares and the hurry- 
ing haunts of men. 

What a benediction is this summering in the pure 
countryside; what a healthful tendency our recent Amer- 
ican seeking of the fields from June to September! May 
every sojourner in God's free meadows and forests look 
back with thanksgiving on the particular region where his 
vacation days were passed, and may he be able to exclaim 
in recollection of it, as did warm-hearted, kindly old Ed- 

[184] 



Autumnal Hours 



ward Fitzgerald, — "Ah, happy Days ! . . . In those 
Meadows far from the World, it seemed, as Salaman's 
Island . . . the Heart of that Happy Valley whose 
Gossip was the Mill-wheel, and Visitors the Summer Airs 
that momentarily ruffled the sleepy Stream." 

"He loved each simple joy the country yields/^ — that is 
the epitaph I should choose, for I feel certain that there 
can be no purer ministry to the heart and soul than that 
deeper ministry underlying the simple and wholesome 
love of clouds and birds and flowers and streams. 

Some lingering strain of the old Greek sentiment, It 
may be, or of the wistful Celtic, reveals to the lover of 
all visible beauty an inner spirit of 

Enchantment 
Old forms forgotten of the world of men 

Still haunt the common ways of life for me; 
Lone vales and dreaming rivers to my ken 

Are fraught with glamour and with mystery. 
I hear strange harmonies among the hills, 

I drink the fragrance of forgotten things; 

In whispering forests still the dryad sings. 
And strange emotion all my being thrills. 

Along green uplands in the flush of dawn 
I catch a glimpse of Dian's girls star-white, 

A phantom troop that speed by copse and lawn 
And fade beyond the wheat field on the height. 

I hear faint music in the shadowy wood 

When winds are stirring in the chestnut leaves, 
An elfin strain; — so plaintively it grieves, 

I would not miss Its pathos If I could! 
[185] 



Brandywine Days 



And I have seen by solitary meads 

In violet days whtn April yet was young, 

The rueful Pan among the river reeds, 
And heard his w^istful elegies outflung. 

And through the hush of soft September hours. 
When corn was yellow 'neath the harvest moon, 
Methought Sylvanus piped an eerie tune 

As low he lurked amid the fading flowers. 

As some lone child that wanders far from home, 
Sees all its sweetness through his tender tears, 

So phantoms fair of Hellas and old Rome 
Arise for me from out the ancient years. 

The paths of life to others sad may seem, — 
They cannot but be glorified for me 
Who find them fraught with myth and mystery 

And all enchantments of the world of dream. 



[186] 



GOOGE'S ECLOGUES ONCE MORE 

EPTEMBER III. To-day I turn once more to 
Googe's quaint bucolics. In Egloga Tertia, the 
herdsman Menalcas begs his comrade Coridon 
to tell him something of the "Townes estate;" whereupon 
there follow the usual strictures upon city life as compared 
with the innocence of life in the fields. Coridon's closing 
verses are these, — 

"I, synce I sawe suche synfull syghts, 

dyd never lyke the Towne, 
But thought it best to take my sheepe, 

and dwell upon the downe. 
Whereas I lyve, a pleasaunt lyfe, 

and free from cruell handes, 
I wolde not leave the pleasaunt fyelde 

for all the Townysh Landes." 

Such has ever been the note of country simplicity, and 
it loses none of its attraction in Googe's quaint lines. And 
for a farewell to honest Barnabe, take his song in honor of 
''the immortal kynge," equal to Herrick's Noble Num- 
bers in its sincere gratefulness: 

"Who gyves us pasture for our beasts 

and blesseth our encrease: 
By whom, while others cark and toyle 

we lyve at home with ease. 
Who keepes us down, from climyng hye 

wher honour breeds debate. 
And here hath graunted us to lyve 

in symple Shephards state, 

[187] 



Brandy wine Days 



A lyfe that sure doth farre exceade 

eche other kynd of lyfe: 
O happy state, that doth content, 

How farre be we from stryfe?" 

Almost like music from some lost Arcadian world 
seem these pleasant, old-time pastorals of Barnabe Googe; 
yet, if read in congenial mood, in the idyllic setting of 
Brandywine meadows, — so like England's peaceful stream- 
side fields, — their quaint philosophy may prove not wholly 
alien. 



[188] 



SPIRIT OF SEPTEMBER 



SEPTEMBER V 



O SPIRIT of September, I have seen 
Thy wandering footsteps by the lonely rill 
That winds and murmurs under willows green 
Below yon high-browed hill ; 
And I have followed thee through orchards olden 

And watched thy wistful face in silence pass 
Where mellow apples round and ripe and golden 
Lie thickly in the grass; — 

II 

Lie in the grass where once in pleasant drowse 

Methought I saw thee in the dove-cote's shade 
Weaving a wreath of asters for thy brows 

In sweet and fragrant braid. 
And by the woodland edge, 'mid moss and myrtle, 

When thou wert dancing o'er the faery green, 
With heaps of fern and flowers in thy kirtle, 

Thee, Spirit, have I not seen ? 

Ill 

Have I not seen thee in the azure morn 
Glide noiseless as a phantom summer cloud 

Where waved the tassels of the yellow corn 
And vagrant crows called loud ; 

[189] 



Brandy wine Days 



Or watched thee in the twilight pale and hazy 
With drooping head roam far adown the stream 

Whose wandering waters languorous and lazy- 
Fill our soft vale with dream ? — 

IV 

Fill it with dream and mystery and charm 
In rosy dawns and noons and slumbrous eves, 

Where smile the acres of the ancient farm 
With stacks and golden sheaves, 

With rustic wealth of timothy and clover, 

And meadows where the soft-eyed heifers graze. 

And fields of thick-sown millet toppling over, 
And slopes of tasseled maize; — 

V 

Of tasselled maize and fields where thistle-seeds 

Float on light winds above the luscious sod. 
Where pungent mint and ragweed fill the meads. 

And wild-heart goldenrod ; 
And gardens lovelier for thy passing there, — 

So stately seem the silken hollyhocks, 
So sumptuous the lingering roses fair. 
So deeply bright the phlox ; — 

VI 

So bright the phlox and every stately flower 
The season brings ; — but, ah, to think how soon 

Thou'lt fade away as hour by golden hour 
Rolls on toward Autumn's noon! 

[190] 



spirit of September 



Too soon thou'lt fade, O Spirit of September, 
As fade the walnut's and the willow's leaves ; 
But thy deep charm, O how I shall remember 
When Winter sighs and grieves! 



[191] 



A DISCIPLE OF KEATS 



'EPTEMBER VI. Yesterday, when the autumn 
wind grieved in the oak grove, and the yellow 
willow leaves fell on the Brandy wine's dark 
waters, I read a volume of poetry that took me back 
very happily to those eternal favorites, Spenser and Keats, 
— poetry stately and dreamful like that of the 'Taerie 
Queene," wistful and beautiful like that of the "Ode to 
Autumn." It was the newly collected work of Madison 
Cawein, the best of his voluminous output, gathered into 
a thick little book, and championed by Edmund Gosse in 
an essay with all his charm of style and delicacy of in- 
sight. 

Wholly in keeping with the pensive autumnal day 
seemed this sonnet, — 



"So Love is dead, the Love we knew of old! 

And in the sorrow of our hearts' hushed halls 
A lute lies broken and a flower falls; 
Love's house is empty and his hearth is cold. 
Lone in dim places, where sweet vows were told, 
In walks grown desolate, by ruined walls, 

Beauty decays ; and on their pedestals 
Dreams crumble, and the immortal gods are mould. 
Music is slain or sleeps; one voice alone, 

One voice awakes, and like a wandering ghost 
Haunts all the echoing chambers of the Past — 
The voice of Memory, that stills to stone 

The soul that hears; the mind that, utterly lost, 
Before its beautiful presence stands aghast." 

[192] 



A Disciple of Keats 



It is a fine pleasure to study, in our more artistic 
writers of verse, their relation to the masters of song, to 
find in the mystery and haunting quality of Bliss Carman 
some remembrance of Coleridge and Shelley, to hear the 
Wordsworthian note in the late Philip Henry Savage's 
work, to feel the old Virgilian charm in the Pennsyl- 
vania sonnets of Lloyd Mifflin, the antique druid solem- 
nity and Celtic spirituality in the lyrics of the late Lionel 
Johnson. And in the case of Madison Cawein, it is a de- 
light to find a continued allegiance to Keats, and through 
Keats to Spenser. My friend Dr. Glenn L. Swiggett, 
who is fond of tracing literary origins, has detailed a con- 
versation with Mr. Cawein, when the poet told of his 
boyhood rapture over a copy of Hales' "Longer English 
Poems," and of his "eternal obligation, for his acquired 
taste, to Spenser, Milton, and Tennyson," as revealed to 
him in that book. We may take it, therefore, that the 
splendid harmony and soft glow of the Frothalamion 
touched the imagination of the ardent youth and made 
him a poet, as surely as the reading of Christabel woke 
Stephen Phillips to his inheritance from the Muses. 

Madison Cawein, and a new poet, J. E. Spingarn, of 
Columbia University, revive the Spenserian tradition in 
a notable way, very refreshing in these modern days. And 
to his affluent Spenserian harmony, Cawein unites the 
brooding Celtic attitude of Keats. Old Kentucky be- 
comes under his eyes the home of forgotten deities of 
forest and river-shore; twilight sheaves and glimmering 
trees appear like mythical forms, and antique Hellas re- 
awakens in our New World meadows. No other Ameri- 
can poet has ventured on so frank a pantheism as has 

[193] 



Brandy wine Days 



Cawein; and presenting it in simple and lucid fashion, it 
seems with him an attitude wholly natural. 

"Like some white witch, some ghostly ministrant, 
Some spectre of some perished flower of phlox;" 

thus he conceives of the twilight moth. Nevermore, he 
says to a fallen beech, — 

"Shall the storm, with boisterous hoof-beats, under 
Thy dark roof dance, Faun-like, to the humming 
Of the Pan-pipes of the rain and thunder." 

He asks if bird-songs be perchance spirit voices, — 

"Is it a Naiad singing in the dusk, .... 
Or just a wild-bird voluble with thanks?" 

Is the forest's warm fragrance the sighing of 

"A sylvan Spirit, whose sweet mouth did breathe 
Her viewless presence near us, unafraid?" 

The sumptuous poem "Myth and Romance" is filled with 
this blithe neo-Hellenism ; in his reverie the poet beholds 
a train of fabled images: 

"Now 'tis a Satyr piping serenades 

On a slim reed. Now Pan and Faun advance 
Beneath green-hollowed roofs of forest glades, 
Their feet gone mad with music." 

Thus does that long-dead time live again for this dreamer 
of happy imagination. 

"All around me, upon field and hill. 
Enchantment lies as of mysterious flutes." 

In all his harking back to Greece, Madison Cawein re- 
sembles Keats ; as he does, too, in his easy familiarity with 

[194] 



A Disciple of Keats 



Oberon and his faery company. The genial sympathy of 
William Dean Howells has frequently enlisted itself in 
support of our poet's Hellenism, — nowhere more felici- 
tously, I think, than where he avows that these verse- 
pictures of Mr. Cawein's "incarnate the soul of the warm, 
rich, lazy land. ... In all that is sylvan, all that 
is pastoral, his sensuous rhyme takes my homesick fancy 
with a tenderness which I hope does not disable my judg- 
ment. . . . This poet wins his airiest, his most sub- 
stantial, success when he finds the fabled past amidst the 
blue-grass meadows and wood-pastures of the Ohio Val- 
ley." 

The warmest of his critics admit that Mr. Cawein 
has been, perhaps, overfluent; but I would not dwell on 
this, for the body of verse of classic and glowing beauty 
that he has given us entitles him to our full gratitude. 
And I count it no derogation to say that he is at his 
best when, consciously imbued with the spirit of Keats, 
he portrays his homeland scenes in pulsing and impas- 
sioned stanzas, with vision lucid and of a Greek intensity. 

I should like to set down many a line of pure loveli- 
ness which I have underscored in "Kentucky Poems," but 
must content myself with this little fragment of our poet's 
creed, — 

"There is a poetry that speaks 

Through common things: the grasshopper, 
That in the hot weeds creaks and creaks, 

Says all of summer to my ear; 

And in the cricket's cry I hear 
The fireside speak, and feel the frost 

Work mysteries of silver near 
On country casements." 

[195] 



WALTER PATER AGAIN 



Upon his noble books I've loved to muse 
Since those white days in Oxford long ago 

I heard his gracious words and saw him wrapt 
In pensive reverie pacing to and fro. 

EPTEMBER VII. "Carpe diem!"— the old Ro- 
man poet's injunction was faithfully interpreted 
by Oxford's Idealist. Let us make each of our 
days happy and serviceable. Why all this beauty in the 
humanity and nature round about us, save for daily joy 
and thanksgiving? 

As surely as Wordsworth taught us to see ''in com- 
mon things that round us lie" the hand of the very God, 
and revealed, to us who love Him, 

"The earth and every common sight . 
Apparelled in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream," 

so surely does Walter Pater, in his lucid and tranquil 
prose-discourse waken us to fresh recognition of the 
vital beauty of daily life. We owe it to our best selves, 
this wise teacher held, to make **our own each highest 
thrill of joy that the moment offers us — be it some touch 
of color on the sea or the mountains, the early dew in the 
crimson shadows of a rose." 

From the stimulating conversation of a thoughtful 
friend, from a lonely ramble beside some drowsy stream 
among October's drifting gold, from an evening of glo- 

[196] 



Walter Pate?'' Again 



rious music, from voyaging through strange seas of thought 
in the pages of some beloved and impassioned author — 
Plato, or Virgil, or "our sage and serious Poet Spenser" 
— from such precious experiences, Walter Pater w^ould 
have said, let us glean such inspiration as may seem "by 
a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment;" for 
to Pater it was clear that "the service of philosophy, and 
of religion and culture as well, to the human spirit, is to 
startle it into a sharp and eager observation." 

Memory meant much to Pater, as much as it meant 
to Charles Lamb himself; he would have us build 
for ourselves "nests of pleasant thoughts," through the 
wise cherishing of every noble sight or fine experience or 
memorable conversation or happy hour among books and 
music. Walter Pater's golden book, "Marius the Epi- 
curean," tells of " a young Roman feeling his way in early 
life through the religions, the philosophies^ the arts of the 
time of Marcus Aurelius." It portrays the young pa- 
trician Marius as a favored youth, serious and sweet and 
high-minded, seeking diligently and religiously after per- 
fection of life, perfection of faith, perfection of friendship. 
To this youth of healthy, pure and vigorous character 
comes a great desire for richness and fullness of life. 
Marius moves across that strange old lost Roman world, 
a gracious and lovable figure, gathering to his heart what- 
ever of noble and uplifting crosses his pathway, and with 
fine delicacy igno-ring the evil and the gross. There is 
the pathos of immortal youth about Marius; it lingers 
with the reader like some fine fragrance, as of old laven- 
dered linen, or of dead rose-leaves among the faded silks 
of our grandmothers in country attics; for with sure lit- 

[197] 



Brandy wine Days 



erary art Pater makes his hero die young, thus giving to 
his brief beautiful days the pathos of unfulfilled renown. 
Yes, this bright young life is cut down while yet the fair 
city of God, toward which the eager young eyes are di- 
rected so ardently, lies dreamily beyond the mists of the 
fast-fading pagan world. Confident that Love must tri- 
umph, Marius passes to where "beyond these voices there 
is peace." 

This masterpiece of the Oxford teacher is a work of 
lasting beauty; the clear, bright style, so firm and chast- 
ened, so musical and gracious, will carry it down the years, 
and its pure message will touch hearts yet unborn. Are 
not its precepts in harmony with the best that Socrates or 
Plato taught, or that found enduring expression from 
those sinless lips "beneath the Syrian blue"? — 

"Be temperate in thy religious motions, in love . . . 
in all things, and of a peaceful heart with thy fellows." 

"Meditate upon children at play in the morning, the 
trees in early spring." 

Choose "whatever form of human life may be heroic, 
impassioned, ideal." 

Walter Pater's doctrines cannot be lightly spoken of 
or overlooked. Of immense import do they become when 
we recognize that they convey anew those divine words: 
"I am come that they might have life and that they might 
have it more abundantly." 

This book, "Marius the Epicurean," assuredly fulfills 
Milton's definition of a good book — "the precious life- 
blood of a master-spirit embalmed and treasured up on 
purpose to a life beyond life." 

Eighteen years have passed since I heard the living 

[198] 



Walter Pater Again 



voice of Walter Pater ; yet as I read in the white pages of 
"Marius," or the other volumes, blending with the mur- 
muring song of the sylvan Brandywine I hear that voice 
again, as on that far-ofE summer evening in old-world 
Oxford, "that sweet city with her dreaming spires," "the 
city where the Muses all have sung." I hear the rapt 
tones, the harmonious periods of his gentle eloquence, 
as he lectures on Raphael, celebrating, as always, Youth — 
this time a real youth, but none the less a brother in spirit 
to Marius the dream-youth of old Rome. That evening is 
one of the memories that cannot die! 

What his teachings meant to his chosen students — 
and no one became his student without also becoming his 
friend — may be seen in the elegy for Walter Pater, writ- 
ten by his devoted disciple, the late Lionel Johnson: 

"Gracious God rest him, he who toiled so well 
Secrets of grace to tell 
Graciously ...... 

Half of a passionately pensive soul 

He showed us, not the whole ; 

Who loved him best, they best, they only, knew 

The deeps, they might not view .... 

Calm Oxford autumns and preluding springs ! 

To me your memory brings 

Delight upon delight, but chiefest one; 

The thought of Oxford's son. 

Who gave me of his welcome and his praise, 

When white were still my days; 

Scholarship's constant saint, he kept her light 
In him divinely white ; . . . . 
Oh, sweet grave smiling of that wisdom, brought 
From arduous ways of thought; 

[199] 



Brandy wine Days 



Oh, golden patience of that travailing soul, 

So hungered for the goal! 

Ended, his services; yet, albeit, farewell 

Tolls the faint vesper bell. 

Patient beneath his Oxford trees and towers 

He still is gently ours: 

Hierarch of the spirit, pure and strong, 

Worthy Uranian song. — 

Gracious God keep him: and God grant to me 

By miracle to see 

That unforgetably most gracious friend, 

In the never-ending end." 



[200] 



THE INDIAN^S GRAVE 



'EPTEMBER XL This day a gathering of honor- 
able historians comes to our hills to dedicate a 
massive stone over the Indian's grave, w^hereon 
is inscribed this epitaph : 



Here Rests 

INDIAN HANNAH 

The Last of the Lenni Lenape 

Indians in Chester County 

Who Died in 1802 



Last of her race, she sleeps in this lone grave, — 
Lowly and lone, and dim and half-forgot 
In these last hundred summers since she died ; 
Last of her race, — laid here so long ago 
And gently mourned by folk of alien stock, 
But not of alien hearts, kind Quaker folk 
Who cherished the lone Indian, cared for her, 
And made her loneliness less sorrowful, 
Till life went out. 

And so went out a race 
That through uncounted cycles had their home 
Besides Wawassan's wild and wandering stream,- 
Tracking the bear and elk among these hills 
And taking fish in those rude stone-built dams 
[201] 



Brandywine Days 



That still remain in old Wawassan's stream, 

And celebrating round their flickering fires 

Strange pagan rite and solemn dance of war, — 

So long and long ago! — ere yet our sires 

Forced Magna Carta on reluctant John, 

Or yielded unto Alfred's kindly law, 

Yea, even ere they stormed the eastern shores 

Of Britain, rovers on the wild North Sea, — 

So long ago this old Algonquin folk 

Hunted and warred and worshipped 'mid the woods 

That hid these hills in endless greenery. 

What tribal memories survived in her. 

That last lone Indian woman, — what remote 

And pale tradition from the ancient years. 

Of sylvan loves and wars, heroic deeds 

Of deathless chieftains, wisdom of the gods? 

I think some primal feeling surely stirred 

At times that lonely heart brooding the Past, 

When in gray autumn twilights by her fire 

She mused and mourned, recalling how in youth 

She heard the old men grieve, old women weep 

O'er territory wrested from their tribe 

By the intruding English. Hopelessly 

They grieved and wept; — she could not understand 

The great All-Father's will, she only knew 

How numbers lessened, how the forests fell 

And spoiled the hunting, how the fishing failed, 

And how as farmland after farmland spread 

Along Wawassan's shores, her people waned 

In ancient power and comfort. 

[202] 




'Leafy summer solitudes' 



The Indian s Grave 



— 'TIs but little 
We do, in honoring her name to-day, 
Toward offering penance for the pitiless force 
Exerted by our sires against her race. 
To-day, among these grand old Indian hills. 
And by this wild and wandering Indian stream, 
In reverence and sorrow let us rear 
This strong rude boulder o'er the Indian's grave, 
We, of the alien English, paying thus 
Some tribute small of honor and remorse 
Unto the noble natives of these hills 
By Indian Wawassan's mourning stream. 



[203] 



MORE OF VAUGHAN^S VERSES 

'EPTEMBER XII. Taking up Henry Vaughan's 
quaint book this morning beside the cool Bran- 
dywine, I find his spirit in harmony with the pas- 
toral quietude of these old farm landscapes. The seclusion 
of country life was blissful for Vaughan; and, moreover, 
he was a brother of the angle. 

"Rural shades are the sweet sense 
Of piety and innocence; , 
If Eden be on earth at all, 
'Tis that which we the Country call." 

His very enumerations, like those of his poet-brother 
Robert Herrick, smack of rural felicities, — 

"Sweet, downie thoughts, soft Lily-shades, Calm streams, 
Joyes full and true, 
Fresh, spicie mornings, and eternal beams." 

Vaughan's dedications always yield some quaint fancy, 
some naive charm ; that of his first volume tastes of the 
new-fledged author fresh from the delicate nurture of col- 
lege days, — 

"To all Ingenious Lovers of Poesy: To you alone, whose 
more refined spirits out-wing these dull times, and soar above the 
drudgery of dirty intelligence, have I made sacred these fancies." 

In the riper fruits of his pen Vaughan expresses the 
hope that his lighter pieces may be found 

"interlined with many virtuous, and some pious mixture 

some prelibation of those heavenly refreshments which descend 

but seldom." 

[204] 



More of Vaughan s Verses 

We moderns often treat our books too lightly, but the 
stately folios of Henry Vaughan's day were cherished and 
beloved. ''Bright books," he calls them affectionately, 

"The track of fled souls, and their milkie way." 

The English Church, so venerable, so comforting, held 
all that was dearest In religion for Henry Vaughan; no 
other faith could so warm his heart with the gracious rit- 
ual and mystic symbolism craved by men of his patrician 
tastes. In his verse we seem to hear low-breathed organ 
music and the fading cadences of magnificent anthems. 
His very titles are redolent of the Book of Common Pray- 
er. Hence it Is that Vaughan's most devoted readers have 
been those who love the beautiful sanctities and traditions 
of the Anglican Church. — Beside the river Usk the poet 
sleeps, the river that had erst composed his thoughts "to 
more than Infant softness." 

Miss Louise Imogen Gulney, the poet-critic, has writ- 
ten an essay full of exquisite appreciation of the Welsh 
singer; furthermore, she performed the pious service, not 
many years ago, of restoring his long-neglected and for- 
gotten grave In the lonely churchyard of Llansantffread 
among his grand native hills. 

"The earlier and purer fires of Christianity" glow in 
Vaughan's poetry; — I would not ask for nobler poetry 
for reading on a Sabbath morning of summer amid the 
country's peace and holy quietude beside our little river. 



[205] 



AT CEDARCROFT 

Home of Bayard Taylor 



(ToJ.M.) 

SEPTEMBER XIII 

HAUNT of old repose and peacefulness 
Is this red mansion with its dreamy lawns, 
Its shadowy evergreens and druid oaks, 
Its orchards and its deep and silent woods. 
Would you were here this soft September day 
To share with me in this enchanted scene, — 
You to whom Taylor's memory is dear, — 
To sit beneath these bowering apple trees 
Whose ruddy fruit shines thickly in the grass. 
And watch the phantom islands of the air 
Drift high above; to hear the sleepy songs 
Of locusts in the leafy solitudes 
And lonely birds along the woodland edge; 
And see the butterflies in airy throng 
Hover, and veer, and flit on fairy wings 
Among the phlox and musky marigolds. 

Peace reigneth here, and faint and far away 
Seems all the noisy clamor of the world. 
Peace reigneth here among these sunny glades 
And under these dear ancient evergreens, 
Cedar and fir and yew and spicy box; — 
Peace, drowsed with early autumn fragrances 
Of mellowing pears and plums and ripening corn 

[206] 



At Cedarcroft 



And breath of wild grapes in the woodland bowers; — 

Peace, doubly sweet because once dear to him 

Who built this homestead in the bygone years, 

Cherished these lawns and noble forest trees 

And reared yon tower, from whose commanding height 

Looking across the land his boyhood loved, — 

These blissful landscapes of old Chester County, — 

He gazed o'er pastoral slopes and sylvan dells. 

O'er singing rills, o'er billowy fields of wheat 

And balmy orchards, to the misty edge 

Of these green townships in the Kennett hills. 

Would you were here with me, old friend, to read 
Our Poet's page beneath his own great trees 
And In his own library's deep repose! 
All day I've dwelt with joy on his rich verse. 
From those clear early songs whose music drew 
Sweetness from Shelley's wondrous harmonies, 
To those full organ-tones of his ripe years, 
August and stately, such as men might chant 
On victor fields or in cathedral aisles. 
And over all his flood of ardent song 
And high-wrought sentiment and starry truth 
There breathes the peace of these first autmn days. 
Touching with golden mists his beauteous lines. 
And these Arcadian bowers of Cedarcroft 
With tenderest pathos and with pensive charm. 



[207] 



OLD AND NEW PASTORAL POETS 

'EPTEMBER XIV. The pastoral tradition has 
never faded from our English verse; Spenser 
gave It enduring foundation, and Colin Clout's 
rustic pipe has never been silent for long. The Elizabethan 
song-books are adorned with shepherd songs from for- 
gotten hands; and most buoyant, fresh and altogether 
charming are those pastoral ditties, — as In Phyllidas Love- 
Call:— 

"Phyllida: Phyllida, thy true love, calleth thee, 
Arise then, arise then. 
Arise and keep thy flock with me ! 

Corydon: Phyllida, my true love, is it she? 
I come then, I come then, 
I come and keep my flock with thee. 

Phyllida : Here are cherries ripe for my Corydon ; 

Eat them for my sake. 
Corydon: Here's my oaten pipe, my lovely one, 

Sport for thee to make." 

George Peele wrote pastoral lyrics with true felicity. 
What an Arcadian simplicity In the Idyllic dialogue of 
QEnone and Paris! — 

"CEnone: Fair and fair, and twice so fair. 
As fair as any may be; 
The fairest shepherd on our green, 
A love for any lady. 

[208] 



Old and New Pastoral Poets 

Paris: Fair and fair and twice so fair, . 
As fair as any may be; 
Thy love is fair for thee alone, 
And for no other lady. 

QEnone: My love is fair, my love is gay, 

As fresh as bin the flowers in May, 
And of my love my roundelay. 

My merry, merry, merry roundelay." 

The country-songs of Robert Greene have all the in- 
nocence of the old age, and a certain quality of tenderness 
very characteristic of the creator of sweet Margaret of 
Fresslngfield. 

Browne's Britannia s Pastorals are usually read, I be- 
lieve, at first for Keats' sake, — the later poet found them 
enchanting, — and then for their own sake as portraying 
shepherd life in old Devonshire In delightful old-fashioned 
verse. The eclogues and songs of these Pastorals tell, in 
quaint, heartfelt language, of country joys, of merry 
shepherds piping on green hillocks, of English nightingales 
and robins and wrens, of 

"fiow'ry valleys 
Where Zephyr with the cowslip hourly dallies," 

of well-piled hay-ricks, of barns where ring the threshing 
flails, of orchards laden with pears and plums and apricots, 
of many 

"a jocund crew of 3'outhful swains 
Wooing their sweetings with delicious strains." 

Browne leads his readers through a pastoral land of un- 
sullied old-world charm and delight; and he easily per- 
suades us, during this poetic journey, that 

[209] 



Brandy wine Days 



"Free there's none from all this wordly strife 
Except the shepherd's heaven-bless'd life." 

Browne's ^brother-poet of Devon, — Robert Herrick, — Is, 
in pastoral verse, as elsew^here, of a unique gusto and 
quaint felicity. His Beucolickj or Discourse of Neatherds 
lacks simplicity perhaps, but Its art Is of the true Her- 
rick flavor, echoing as It does 

"The soft, the sweet, the mellow note 
That gently purles from eithers Oat — " 

"A suger'd note and sound as sweet 
As Kine when they at milking meet." 



and 



Among living poets of the pastoral tradition Lloyd 
Mifflin Is eminent. We have seen his command of Idyllic 
color and charm In his sonnets; and especially In a group 
of fifty sonnets. In Quiet Fields, Mr. Mifflin, with rural 
Pennsylvania for his background, writes In the mood of 
Theocritus. Here Is part of his vision of antique shepherd 
life: 

. "faint is heard and slow 

The pipe of some brown Faun beneath the pine. 
There upland streams, dissolving, reach the vales; 

And there are groves of ilex and of yew, 
Unending valleys and Illyrian dales, 

And gods reclining where the soft winds woo; 
And azure seas there are, and sunset sails. 

And shepherds piping on the capes of blue." 

And for a closing extract, let me quote from his pic- 
ture of ^'Autumn, that drowsy Faun," who 

[210] 



Old and New Pastoral Poets 



"Dozes anear the cider-press for days, 

Sipping the oozed juice of pomace lees; 
And, leaning on the cope of orchard walls, 
Watches the golden apple till it falls. . . . 

Who spreads the dim and amethystine haze 

In all the dells, and for the full-fed bees 
Bursts the late pear, and makes its mell increase. . . 

Who wafts the thistle-down to far-off seas. 
And spins the spider threads across the fields 

Of evening, golden in the setting sun." 

Is this not in the very spirit of Theocritus and of 
Keats ? 



[211] 



WITH LLOYD MIFFLIN^S SONNETS 

SEPTEMBER XV 

^^^^OVING the shores of my ancestral stream 
t^C Beneath old solitary willow trees, 

Or musing in still gardens where the bees 
Drone all day long, and yellow roses gleam, 
And all the sleepy summer world doth seem 
In golden revery wrapt; or at large ease 
Wandering among the billowy clover seas, — 
I read his Sonnets, lost in pensive dream. 

O then a spirit-music lulls the ear 

And sets the drowsy afternoon a-thrill; 

And o'er that dear home-stream and ancient farm, 
Across the languorous garden-blooms, I hear, — 

Blow^n as from flutes on some green Mantuan hill, — 
Virgilian pathos and Virgilian charm! 



[212] 



THE OLD-FASHIONED GARDEN 

''Half -drowned in sleepy peace it lay. 
As satiate with the boundless play 
Of sunshine in its green array/' 

EPTEMBER XVI. "Ghost-like I paced round 
the haunts of my childhood." Every reader of 
Charles Lamb remembers how Elia loved in sum- 
mer days to go with his sister for a visit to the land of an- 
cestral associations, ''hearty, homely, loving Hertford- 
shire.'* A like happiness was ours in journeying yesterday 
to that township in the sister shire of Lancaster, of which 
I have spoken in my "Hour-Glass" heretofore. Over the 
long hills we jogged, through the townships with their 
English and Irish names — Marlborough and Londonderry, 
Nottingham and Drumore, — past old red brick farm- 
houses with purple phlox in every dooryard, and between 
fields of wild carrot and odorous ragweed, coming at last 
to the remembered farmsteads where the rosy country cous- 
ins welcomed us with old-time cordiality. 

To visit the ancestral House, now long passed from 
the possession of the family, was to awaken recollections 
that had slumbered nigh a score of years. Here it was 
the same and not the same. The old Mansion beside the 
lane was serene and cool and peaceful as of yore, though 
with an air of slow ruin about its ivied gables and leaning 
pillars; and beyond where the corridors of hollyhocks 
once stood, the orchard showed the familiar apples on 
many a drooping bough. But where were the straw bee- 

[213] 



Brandy wine Days 



hives, where the latticed arbors, and where the winding 
walks of tan bark o'er which childish feet loved to pat- 
ter? And the mouldering House, — like a ghostly thing it 
seemed in its neglect and loneliness, — the forms of be- 
loved ones gone from its portals many a year! 

"Oh, none but Silence and the Past to greet 
The weary heart that on the threshold stands, 
Only the wind to answer eager feet, 
And only shades to touch the outstretched hands! 
The house is but poor Love's neglected grave, 
While young and glad and bright with summer's glow, 
Like strange sweet spray upon Time's beating wave, 
Against its grief the happy flowers grow." 

And in the old-fashioned Garden beyond the House, 
how little was left of all that pristine glow and fragrance 
and sunny charm ! No poppies now flamed there ; no cow- 
slip or candytuft bloomed, no harebell or peony; no 
sweet-williams in bright troops, no masses of scarlet sage 
or sweet old bergamot. Yet still flourished the ancient 
althea, in whose branches the thrush used to pour out 
his heart; and its red flowers were redolent of lost 
days; and a few pungent herbs persisted in a sheltered 
corner. Yet the ragged-robins, the asters, the foxgloves, 
the *Weet-peas on tiptoe for a flight," the marigolds and 
lavender, and the evening primroses that used to "blossom 
with a silken burst of sound," the larkspurs and fairy-fine 
coreopsis, the heliotropes, columbines and all the roses, — 
sweet-briar, moss-rose, old Scotch yellow rose, and many 
another of the "heart-desired roses" dear to our grand- 
mothers, — all were gone — all! Only a wild tangle of 
morning-glories rippling o'er the hedge, and a few strag- 

[214] 



T'he Old-Fashioned Garden 

glfng balloon-vines, remained to tell of the primal loveli- 
ness of this sweet flowery place where to-day Melancholy 
and Forgetfulness brood amid phantoms of the Past. 

Here it was that, like Elia, I "a lonely child wondered 
and worshipped everywhere," and caught a little, I trust, 
of the "love and silence and admiration" which Elia avers 
are fed by the solitude of childhood. For me no poppies 
or peonies were ever so sumptuous, no hollyhocks so grace- 
fully tall, no marigolds so yellow, no pinks so spicy, as 
those that grew in this old, old Garden. 

"In that lost world of sweet and fearful joy 
Still dwells and dreams a boy 
Dear to my heart as some wild flower of song 
Heard on a summer night, and lost, alas, so long!" 

I was too young then to know the poets, — to read 
Herrick here among the golden daffodils, Marvell or 
Keats under the orchard trees, or Fitzgerald's Omar in the 
fragrant rose-arbor. But is there a page of these lau- 
reates of the flowers that has not a keener savor because 
of the remembrances of this ancestral Garden arising to 
illustrate every allusion and happy picture? 

O here on dreamy August afternoons 

Who would not pore on Herrick's golden Book; 

And here among the Roses that are June's, 
On some green bench within a leafy nook. 

Where rosy petal-drift might strew the page, 

'Twere sweet to read the pensive numbers of old Persia's 
Sage, 

[215] 



Brandy wine Days 



Omar Khayyam, the Wisest of the Wise. 

Ah, now in balmy Naishapur he sleeps 
These almost thousand years; and where he lies 

His well-loved Rose each spring her petals weeps. 
Of what may be hereafter no man knows, — 
Then let us live to-day, he cried, as lives the lovely Rose! 

This old Garden was like Andrew Marvell's, — it had 
no sun dial ; there were only the morning-glories, and the 
four-o'clocks and the evening primroses, to suggest the 
passing of the day. 

"How could such sweet and wholesome hours 
Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers!" 

Yes, here was lacking the sun dial, that central shrine 
of a Garden, with "the simple altar-like structure and si- 
lent heart-language'' so loved of Charles Lamb. Yet 
though these flowery avenues radiated from no such quaint 
recorder of the lazy hours of summer, let me here in- 
vent, as for an imaginary dial in this Garden of beautiful 
memory, this motto, — 

^mppt nib? Momrra, — 
(II|r Oliiilbrtt Irarrs, — 
^ mak? ttj^m \\w\t \ 



[216] 



THE GIFTS OF GOD 



X 



SEPTEMBER XVII 

'SAW a woman pale with care 
Beside the way; 

Wistful of face she wandered there 
This autumn day. 

Her thin hands held blue asters blent 
With goldenrod, 

And so I knew that she had spent 
An hour with God 



Among the fields; that she had come 
With weary feet 

Fleeing her poor and narrow home 
To walk the sweet 

Uncrowded, pure, clean country waj^s, 
And for an hour 
Find respite from unresting days, 
With bird and flower. 

Alas! how many souls like thine, 
Unhappy thralls, 
Do poverty and need confine 
In city walls ! 

Ah, not for them night's mystery 
And odorous dark. 
Nor the enchanted piping free 
Of dawn's first lark; 

[217] 



Brandy wine Days 



For them no image deep and soft 
In tranquil stream, 
Of great cloud-islands far aloft 
That drift and dream. 

The chiming frog, the wood-thrush sweet, 
The sad rain-crow, 
The harvest songs among the wheat, 
They may not know. 

They may not look day after day 
On falling leaf. 

As pensive Autumn pines away 
In golden grief. 

Nay, these poor souls all closely pent 

'Mid dust and heat 

Of dark and grimy tenement 

And sordid street, 

Must count one day 'mid orchard slopes 
And by calm streams 
Fulfilment of their fondest hopes 
And cherished dreams. 

But we who share each day and hour 
These gifts of God — 
River and wood and cloud and flower 
And emerald sod — 

Do we by reverence aright 
Make these our own? 
Or, careless, shut them from our sight 
With hearts of stone? 
[218] 



AUTUMN SILENCE 



SEPTEMBER XVIII 

DO sound Is heard ; green Newlin's fields are still ; 
No more we hear the wood-dove's pensive cry; 
Without a twitter now the swallows fly. 
Silent the dreamy woods above the mill; 
Silent the drowsy air of Slumberville; 

Silent the sights that meet the musing eye, 
One lonely buzzard climbing the clear sky 
And great cloud-shadows moving up the hill. 

No sound is heard: the sleepy Brandywine 

Scarce whispers as it laps its lazy reeds 
Or drifts where yon late-lingering daisies shine. 

The air is spiced with smoke of burning weeds, 
And o'er the fields where feed the peaceful kine 

Slow sail the thistle's filmy silver seeds. 



[219] 



A CELTIC POET 



''The wail of Irish winds. 
The cry of Irish seas; 
Eternal sorrow finds 

Eternal voice in these/* 

EPTEMBER. XIX. I have been re-reading the 
wistful and beautiful verse of Lionel Johnson, for, 
w^ith the revival of our sympathy for Ireland's 
sorrows, have come the tidings of the death of a poet who 
was passionately devoted to the woful land of his fathers. 
And his poetry, ever shadowed with twilight melancholy 
and mournful dignity, makes illustrious the best years of 
his manhood. 

I remember the thrill that came with the first reading 
of his distinguished and original verse In his poems of 
1895, so filled with old magic and haunting charm, through 
which sounded a high spiritual challenge as from one who 
had brooded long on Plato's * 'starry music," and the mys- 
teries of the mediaeval Catholicism. And I recall the en- 
thusiasm with which Louise Imogen Gulney spoke of that 
volume — she who among our American singers has the 
Celtic spirit in largest measure. 

Mystic the poetry of Lionel Johnson is, at times, but 
not with the elfin mystery of Yeats, enamored as he Is 
of a loveliness that is fast passing from even the charmed 
raths and quickenboughs of the ancient shee. Yeats and 
Nora Hopper and the others thrill to those vanishing 
voices that 

[220] 



A Celtic Poet 



"Wake old harps from silence 
To wail for days of Fionn." 

They have that "gift of rendering with wonderful fe- 
licity the magical charm of nature," of which Matthew 
Arnold spoke — of portraying "the intimate life of nature, 
her weird power and her fairy charm/* 

Lionel Johnson was as Celtic as they, but in a graver 
fashion. He seemed a new Merlin — there was a druidic 
quality in his reverence and his worship of the strange 
hidden powers of the world of enchantment; he was a 
dreamer pondering on the inner significance of things. 
There seemed no place in his vision for even that eerie 
and childlike humor that plays half wistfully over the 
lyrics of his fellows of the Celtic school. Not the intimate, 
delicate personality of the fairy people fascinated him; 
he rather beheld Ireland as a whole, sweeping into his 
pictures a train of thought stately with images and music 
and magic. Thus he wrote to her: 

"Great spirits ride thy winds; thy ways 

Are haunted and enchaunted evermore. 
Thy children hear the voices of old days 

In music of the sea upon thy shore, 
In falling of the waters from thine hills, 

In whispers of thy trees: 
A glory from the things eternal fills 

Their eyes, and at high noon thy people sees 
Visions, and wonderful is all the air. 

So upon earth they share 
Eternity; they learn it at thy knees." 

This poet, then, was the very reverse of Kipling; he 
found his themes in the holy musings of an elder race, fn the 

[221] 



Brandy wine Days 



imaginings of old Druid bards. Materialism and rule by 
force were alien to his song. The soul meant everything 
to him, the Maxim-gun nothing. 

Like Meleager or Theocritus he lived apart from 
the land of his inspiration, for he v^^as born in Kent, least 
Celtic of shires — though he was of Irish descent — and 
made his home in London. 

"Three names mine heart with rapture hails, 
With homage: Ireland, Cornwall, Wales; 
Lands of lone moor and mountain gales, 
And stormy coast." 

All the haunts of ancient Celtic life and tradition took 
his fancy and held him in spell — Tara and Inisfail, Cly- 
wyd, Gwynedd, "Merioneth over the sad moor," ''glit- 
tering Llanarmon," "desolate Cornwall, desolate Britta- 
ny." But most his heart yearned in love for Ireland, the 
"immemorial Holy Land, mother of misericord," — 

"Lonely and loved, O passionate land ! 
Dear Celtic land, unconquered still !" 

where the people, so despised by the sleek disciples of Brit- 
ish imperialism, 

"have no care for meaner things; 
They have no scorn for brooding dreams: 
A spirit in them sings, 
A light about them beams." 

Another group of Johnson's poems concerns the joys 
of culture, celebrating the dear seclusion of the Oxford 
where the poet spent his bright youth, — 

"City of weathered cloister and worn court 
Gray city of strong towers and clustering spires." 

[222] 



A Celtic Poet 



The cedarn chapels and their purple gloom, the cool 
pavements, the chime of full, sad bells, Arnold's hills and 
sweet Jime meadows — these and many another charm he 
sings in 

"Those high places, that are Beauty's home; 
The city, where the Muses all have sung." 

Very wide were this poet's interests. His passionate 
lyric to Parnell, from which I have taken the stanza at 
the head of this paper, may be contrasted with the strong 
poem to Cromwell. In these words can a Cavalier greet 
forgivingly the shade of the great and grave Puritan, — 

"Tragic, triumphant form. 
He comes to your dim ways, 
Comes upon wings of storm; 

Greet him with pardoning praise, 

With marveling awe, with equal gaze." 

But with all his celebration of Winchester and Eton 
and storied Oxford, the love of books and of art, the 
man spoke out of his truest self when Ireland and the 
wild, strange Celtic glories stirred his muse. He refined 
his art with the golden beauty of Hellenic philosophy; and 
he meditated upon the grandeur and processional spectacle 
of Roman history; but the land of his heart's delight held 
him in thrall from first to last. In solemn and devout 
measures of haunting and pensive melody he chanted again 
and again the mystery and glamor of the far Gaelic days, 
and in prophetic voice foretold the ultimate triumph of 
Celtic holiness and spirituality over the materialism and 
imperalism of to-day. 

His poem, "Celtic Speech," his long dithyramb "Ire- 

[228] 



Brandy wine Days 



land," with its "heart of melancholy," his "Gwynedd," 
are bathed with the very atmosphere of the wild wizard 
Gaelic. Ireland has indeed lost a knight of pure soul and 
great hope. Other Celtic poets remain, but none in whom 
the spirit of the ancient bards and Druids lived as it lived 
in Lionel Johnson. 

"Magnificence and grace, 
Excellent courtesy; 
A brightness in the face, 
Airs of high memory; 

Whence came all these to such as he? 

* ^ * * ^ ^ 

Now, when sad night draws down. 

When the austere stars burn; 
Roaming the vast live town, 

My thoughts and memories yearn 
Toward him, who never will return." 



[224] 



CECILY 



G 



SEPTEMBER XX 

ECILY, daughter of dreams, 
Sister of flowers and birds, 
What do the wind-voices sing 
To thy spirit musing apart 
Far in the Brandywine hills? 
What do the waterfalls sing 
Tumbling over cool rocks 
In ferny and shadowy dales? 



O miss not the message they bear, 

Voices primeval and sweet, 

That speak unto those who will hear. 

And feed with their magical song 

Hearts that are tuned to their hearts, 

Cecily, daughter of dreams. 

Sister of flowers and birds. 



[225] 



THE SAGE OF MARSHALLTON AGAIN 

EPTEMBER XXI. In examining the letters of 
the good Quaker, Doctor Fothergill, despatched 
from England to Humphry Marshall in the Ches- 
ter County hamlet near the Brandywane, one finds that 
the Londoner's chief desiderata were such American plants 
as Magnolias, Rhododendrons, Kalmias, Water-lilies, 
Acorns, ''the Fern tribe (a most pleasing part of the crea- 
tion) ;" and Goldenrods, Asters and Sunflowers, of which 
he writes, "you have more than all the world besides." 

In return for the carefully-selected boxes of seeds and 
young plants sent over to England by Humphry Mar- 
shall, Dr. Fothergill presented our Quaker worthy with 
William Penn's Works, translations of Linnaeus, garden- 
ers' dictionaries, and the roots of the Alpine Strawberry. 
In June of 1774 the doctor writes, "I am reckoned to have 
the best collection of North American Plants of any pri- 
vate person in the neighborhood. I am obliged to thee for 
many of them." And in his last letter of all, on the eve of 
the American Revolution, whose approach he keenly la- 
mented. Dr. Fothergill writes to his faithful friend in the 
colonies: "My garden is about five miles from London, 
warm and sheltered, rather moist than dry; and I have 
the satisfaction of seeing all North American plants pros- 
per amazingly." One may easily imagine Marshall's con- 
tentment in reading these epistles beside his hearth in this 
gray mansion, or in these shady avenues of evergreen, In 
the Brandywine hills. 

In this collected correspondence of the sage of Mar- 
[226] 



T'he Sage of Marshal/ton Again 

shallton are letters to and from various worthies of the 
day, Benjamin Franklin among them; and all these letters 
breathe the peacefulness of kindly friendships formed 
through common devotion to the gentlest of the natural 
sciences. 

Whether or not Humphry Marshall was wont to come 
down to the Brandywine hereabouts, to fish and meditate, 
I know not; surely his tranquil tastes would have fitted 
him to be a "brother of the angle." His sympathetic biog- 
rapher closes his account of our rural sage by recording 
with satisfaction the resolution of the Town Council of 
West Chester, whereby the little borough park was desig- 
nated for all time as "The Marshall Square," in commem- 
oration of Humphry Marshall, "one of the earliest and 
most distinguished horticulturalists and botanists of our 
country, having established the second botanic garden in 
this republic; and also prepared and published the first 
treatise on the forest trees and shrubs of the United 
States, and diffused a taste for botanical science which en- 
titles his memory to the lasting respect of his country- 
men." 



[227] 



FAREWELL TO THE FARM 



SEPTEMBER XXII 



X 



SAID farewell unto our pensive Stream, 
And the old farmstead wrapt in autumn s dream ^ 



Farewell unto the village and the mill 

And dark mill-race that winds below the hill; 

Farewell unto the cattle feeding slow 
Where hoary willows stand in silent row; 

Farewell to kindly neighbors^ and farewell 
To these old fields I long have loved so well; 

Farewell, each haunt among these hillsides dear, 
God grant I come to you another year! 



[228] 






3 

O 







m 30 i«tf 



